Gearing up for the festives

Bird and bacon in fridge, sprouts prepared, last Bramley apple picked to grate and add to the stuffing.  Fortnums’ Christmas pudding and Martyn’s ditto cake waiting in the wings, cheeseboard worked out, bread baked.  For the longer term, the remaining bulbs are at last planted out, so we hope we have some spring colour to look forward to - with luck, the squirrels will already have stashed enough acorns.  For the short term, tonight’s meatballs are made and chilling: enough for two meals, so we’ll have a change from leftovers later in the week.  Fairly easy day tomorrow: just the mince pies to make and the pigs in blankets and stuffing to prepare.  So that just leaves the final Christmas Day veggie prep and timetabling.  We’ll have our Christmas dinner in the evening, so have time to get stuff ready at leisure in the afternoon.  Famous last words.

We’re looking forward to hosting Martyn’s sister Sandra on Christmas Day, and have persuaded her to stay the night, so she doesn’t need to drive home in the dark.  We shouldn’t be so patronising: she has recently done a tour of visits in the Cotswolds and the Wye Valley, so when it comes to driving distances, she’s made of sterner stuff than us.  

Talking of motorised transport, Egg2 has sailed through its thirteenth MoT with - as usual - not so much as an advisory.  Given the tiny mileage it does, the main risk is of tyres, bushes etc going brittle (Martyn replaced a couple of rather cracked tyres last year).  Unfortunately our rescue service doesn’t cover vehicles over 16 years old, so we’ll have to do some shopping round next year.  Said service having refused to turn out when I couldn’t open the fuel filler cap (it was presumably sulking at being ignored for so long) I’m tempted to look elsewhere.  My bus passed the 25000 mark this week after a mere 7 years and a couple of months.  My daily hospital visits earlier in the year added an unusual extra thousand miles or so, but it still did only about 3000 miles between MoTs.  Rather more than four times what Egg2 did.