Everyone likes a Christmas mystery. Apparently. They say everyone likes Christmas ghost stories, too, but I’ve never really gone for that one. Anyhow, a mystery. Something, it seems, is digging up the pots on Sal’s decking. It’s been going on for weeks, and every few days or so she’ll get up and find a neat pile of freshly turned soil on the wood beside the pot, and another plant gone who knows where.

It was put down to squirrels.

Until the other day, when the hole was dug a little deeper. Again, the same small pile of dirt beside the pot but this time, there, in the bottom of the hole, was a neatly planted mince pie. No teeth marks or signs of squirrel activity at all.

Strange, she thought, as she tidied away the soil, but shrugged and went inside, forgetting to remove the pie.

Then, the next morning, she looked out at the pot only to see that the soil had been neatly covered over. A little investigative digging revealed that the pie was still in place, but now below three inches of earth.

If the pot wasn’t at the back, behind a locked gate and well away from the road, you might assume it was a person, but that seems highly unlikely. So, what is the mystery animal that distributes food around the neighbourhood? The finger of blame is pointing at Father Christmas, perhaps a little too full from a night of eating all the food left out for him, and ferreting away the excess like this to save the neighbours’ feelings.

But I think that’s fairly unlikely, don’t you?

Bezique is the most convoluted, complicated card game known to humankind. Although, having said that, when you get going it’s not so bad.

Viv taught me. She was taught by my grandmother, and it was my grandmother’s set, with the 50 year old scoring dials, that she used to teach me last night. It was like coming full circle. If I remember correctly, it goes something like this:

You both take a hand of eight cards, dealt out three-two-three. You then turn over the top of the remaining pile to decide the trump and start play. The non-dealer lays a card from their hand, and the dealer then lays one of their own. They don’t have to try and win, and neither do they have to follow suit, so they can in effect throw away useless cards.

However, what they do want to do is win a trick so that they can then declare a scoring meld, such as a royal marriage (king and queen of the trump suit) or common marriage (any matching king and queen of a non-trump suit), four royal cards of different suits, a bezique (rather confusingly a Jack of diamonds combined with a Queen of spades) and so on.

There is nothing below a seven in the pack, so you also get points for laying a seven of the trump suit, and when you get to the end you count up the number of tens and aces you have in the pile of cards you picked up from winning hands earlier in the game.

After every round of two cards is played, the winner of that hand picks up the top unturned card from the pile in the middle of the table, and the loser picks up the card below, thus both replenishing the eight cards in their hand.

Aces score high; tens come next. After that follow the King, Queen, Knave, nine, eight and seven.

Yes. All terribly confusing when you see it written down, and no less confusing when explained orally, so you really need to play it to see how it works.

Churchill was apparently an avid player, although as Wikipedia explains, ‘since the nineteenth century the game has declined in popularity and is now played rarely in English-speaking countries’.

Don’t know why.

I’ve barely seen any TV this Christmas, and as a result it’s been one of the best for years. Yesterday – Boxing Day – we drove in convoy down to Sal’s to spend the day at hers. Oscar spent his time alternately stalking her new mouse-topper slippers or lolling around on our laps to warm up again after an hour spent prowling in the cold.

We were far more sensible, staying indoors drinking bladder-bursting quantities of tea and playing Millionaire (I won), Mancala (Sal won) and Trivial Pursuit (Dad won).

The one concession we made to popular culture was the Dr Who Christmas special, which was a Very Good Thing indeed, as they seem to have poured what remained of the BBC end of year budget into an hour of ridiculous and uncredable (not incredible) drama. What’s the betting they release the seemingly seamless soundtrack as a soundtrack album in the new year?

Today? Well, I have work to do. Boo. But Viv will be back this afternoon and she’s promised to teach me Bezique as we eat herby olives and drink gin. All very deco, particularly as we’ll be using the almost antique set of cards and dials I inherited a few years ago and have been storing safely in my cupboard ever since.

Christmas day isn’t the best time to set the kitchen on fire. So, don’t put towels on the hob to mop up the spitting steamer. Don’t leave them there when you turn it up to 12.

If you do happen to set them on fire, standard protocol is to run with them into the garden, flames licking your fingers, the kitchen filling with smoke, then drop them on the wet lawn and stamp them out. This probably won’t work right away, so be prepared to stamp them into the grass until you’ve put your foot right through them. You might singe your feet doing this.

When you get back in the kitchen, it’ll probably be full of smoke, so you’ll have to re-wash all those clothes you’d just hung up to dry, or you’ll smell like a block of burning urine for the rest of the festive season.

After that, the rest of the day will pass quite smoothly, albeit a little coldly as you’ll have to keep the front and back doors open to blow the smoke out of the rest of the house.

You may just be able to spot your sister through the haze holding up baby clothes to her pregnant bump, worrying about how large and uncomfortable they imply the resulting offspring might be.

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year!

How times have changed. Tonight, BBC4 has been running a whole series of Fanny Cradock cookery programmes back to back. Never before have I seen such a collection of artificial colours that even the the Tweenies would look sepia stood beside them.

Tonight, in the two episodes I watched, she made a Christmas pudding that looked like a dead and decaying brain, and then literally pinched a turkey’s skin off its back so she could stuff bacon and mushrooms up underneath. Not only did it look like a nasty job; the results were utterly revolting. She hacked the turkey to bits with pair of garden secateurs, and looking at the results you’d not have been surprised.

You have to admire the basic simplicity of the programmes, though, for while Nigella brings us into her trendy London townhouse, and Delia hosts programmes in her big Norfolk conservatory, Fanny spent tonight waltzing around a plain-walled kitchen with just two grotty gas cookers (not ovens) stood up behind her. It hasn’t aged well.

So why did she disappear? Well, it seems it was her legendary rudeness that caused her final downfall.

In 1976, Cornish housewife Gwen Troake won a competition called “Cook of the Realm”, the prize being to organise a banquet to be attended by Edward Heath, Earl Mountbatten of Burma and other VIPs. The BBC filmed the result as part of a series called The Big Time, and asked Fanny Cradock to act as one of a number of experts giving Troake advice on her menu. The result would bring about the end of Fanny Cradock’s TV career. Mrs Troake went through her menu of Seafood Cocktail, Duckling with bramble sauce and Coffee Cream dessert. Fanny told her that her menu was too rich, and while accepting that her dessert was delicious, insisted it was not suitable, declaring: ‘You’re among professionals now’. She grimaced, acted as if on the verge of retching, and pretended not to know what a bramble was. She suggested that Troake use a small pastry boat filled with cream and covered with spun sugar. It was completed by an orange slice and a cherry through a cocktail stick, giving the dish the look of a small boat, which Fanny thought was quite suitable for the naval guests.

In the event, the pudding was a disaster and couldn’t be served properly. Robert Morley had also been consulted on the menu and had said that he felt Troake’s original coffee pudding was perfect. However, so insistant was Cradock that she won. When the pudding failed to impress, the public were annoyed that Cradock had seemingly ruined a potential success for the Cornish housewife. Coupled with the rude manner in which Fanny had spoken to Troake, the public demanded her shows be axed from the BBC. Fanny wrote a letter of apology to Troake but the BBC terminated her contract just two weeks after the programme was broadcast. She would never present a cookery programme again. (Source: Wikipedia)

It’s a terrible shame she’s gone. She may have pranced around her grotty kitchen in a ballgown, have worn nasty big jewellery and bows in her hair, garish make-up and nasty hair colour, but she has the ability, even in death, to make the most dismal microwave dinners look like a gourmet feast.

Any one of us, no matter how poor our culinary skills, can feel good about the messes we make in a kitchen after watching two episodes of Fanny back to back.

* The title of this post refers to a comment made by Fanny’s husband on one of her programmes that the viewers, too, could have doughnuts like Fanny’s, before collapsing on the floor in a giggling heap. Needless to say this provoked plenty of complaints in so prudush an age, and Mary Whitehouse picked it up as part of her moral crusade.

Cold and foggy and a little bit wet.

En bona fojntrogo anstataux litet’
Ripozis la dolcxa Jesua kapet’:
La steloj rigardis al nuba vual’
Al eta Jesuo dormanta en stal’.

        In a good manger instead of a bed
        Slept the gentle Jesus’ small head
        The stars looked towards the cloudy veil
        To tiny Jesus sleeping in a stable

La bovoj blekadis post taga labor’;
Sed kusxis Jesuo sen plendo aux plor’.
Jesu’, mi vin amas! Ho, restu kun mi:
Protektu min gxis la matena radi’.

        The cattle brayed after a day’s work
        But Jesus slept without complaint or cry
        Jesus, I love you! Oh, stay with me:
        Protect me until the morning comes

Ho kara Jesuo! Ne iru vi for,
Sed restu proksime por cxiam en kor’.
Bendu infanojn sur ter’ tie cxi,
Gxis vivo cxiela, en gloro kun vi.

        Oh dear Jesus! Don’t go away,
        But stay close forever in my heart
        Bind children on the earth here,
        Until life in heaven, in glory with you.

The Acad

I wish my fan club would stop following me around at this time of year

What a strange day it was yesterday. My last day of work for the year, yet the first working day of the week so far. It all felt strangely detached. Why did I go in for one day in the middle of the week? Well, two reasons, really. First, it was press day, and second, it was the Dennis Christmas Party.

Fortunately the mag was more or less done by the time I arrived, as the power went out not long after three, we were turfed out of the building for health and safety, and that was the end of that.

That’s when things started to get particularly interesting. The party, you see, was fancy dress, and Chris of the Phin was going at Dr Evil, complete with facial scar. He doesn’t have one naturally, so we walked down to the theatrical supplies shop in Covent Garden. What a bizarre place. Looking through the bottles of nasty coloured liquids on the shelves was like poking around in some evil witch’s pantry. Labels like ‘mucus’, ‘puss’ and ‘vomit’ were neatly pasted onto the sides of innocuous looking bottles that sat alongside ‘zesty mint’ flavour blood. There was all manner of moustaches called ‘Lenin’, ‘Bismarck’ or ‘Poirot’, universal horns, small space ears, tombstone teeth… the list goes on and on.

Anyhow, after some extensive digging around in a back room they found the necessary bottle of scar mixture and we decamped to Starbucks where Chris sat and applied it with a fine paint brush, using the back of an iPod as a compact mirror.

We mis-timed things badly, leaving there at six without realising the party didn’t start for another hour, so killed time in an unpleasantly packed Borders on Oxford Street where the queue stretched right back to the doors. We needn’t have stayed so long, though, as we arrived at Wax Bar an hour later to find the place already fairly packed with becostumed colleagues, some of whom were so well disguised they weren’t easy to recognise.

Aston and Ruth came as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill characters; Jules Winnfield and Elle Driver respectively.

Although there was an uncanny resemblance to Borat in some of Aston’s poses.

Phil and Claire

There are way too many unflattering pictures for comfort, which made for a bizarre but very fun end to the year. It was a bit like a surreal Awards ceremony seeing all the people I work with in strange costumes. I would have had a John Malkovich mask like the PC Pro team if it hadn’t been for that power cut, but the lights had gone out just as I was carefully clipping around the ears and I’d left the unfinished disguise on my desk, expecting to pick it up again later.

No such luck. The lights stayed out for the rest of the day, and so my desk stayed in its messy, scattered state, and will be like that when I return next year. Not a thought to relish. In the meantime, though, there’s Christmas and the New Year to enjoy, and I suspect that for the next week and a half, all thoughts of work will be a long, long way from my mind.

Clive and Nik