Today was nice, the stress of attempting to cook a Christmas dinner for the first time was actually quite good fun. In all fairness, my parents did all the prep on Christmas Eve and so all I had to do was:

a. Make sure the oven came on on time
b. Put the turkey in the oven at the right time
c. Look after the turkey, turning to breast-side up after an hour
d. Coordinate all the other shit

Parts a, b and c went really rather well, but when the bird’s juices still weren’t clear when it should’ve been cooked, I did start to panic somewhat.

Bird’s juices, there’s a blast from the past…

…anyway.

Because I’m a complete twat I forgot myself for a moment, I managed to burn my fingers off as I was trying to take the bird (once it had finally decided to cook, for fuck’s sake) from the roasting tin. This is SO debilitating when you’re trying to do anything at all. And painful.

There’s this great thing you can do with roast potatoes – cook them half way, leave them for as long as you need, then finish them off. Who’d have thought? You listening, Nigella? Are you?

Carrots and swede were lovely, apparently. My dog thought so too, but they’re the devil’s food as far as I’m concerned. Vile. Just bypass the middleman and put them straight into the bin.

Sprouts: delish, but sweet baby jesus and all things holy, my poor tummy. My poor little dog.

It was great, really wonderful. My mum and sister were fantastic at easing the pressure of getting it all served up. My brother, his girlfriend and my dad did a fantastic job of preventing my niece from wandering into the kitchen and receiving third degree burns. I think we all had a nice dinner, although my niece managed to eat about eight pigs in blankets and not much else. Saying that, it was a mistake to get her to try the parsnips, which had fallen victim to my forgetfulness and some of which had been essentially cremated.

I’ve spent most of the evening eating cold roast potatoes. They are fucking delish and I refuse to let them share the fate of the excess sprouts that are currently generating dangerous levels of toxic gases in my kitchen bin. No, I don’t bloody compost, for fuck’s sake. I have enough on my plate with all the sodding recycling that I have to deal with without having an explosive bin next to the petrol tank of my car.

Oh good grief, I should be asleep.

But I’m not because:

I got a telescope!
This wasn’t a surprise because I ordered it myself. I’ve spent years looking up into the night sky, wondering at the moon, smiling at Jupiter, annoyed at the cloud cover in this stupid country. I just wanted to see if I could see as much as I could see.

I assembled the thing this morning in a moment of quiet between turning the turkey and going into a blind panic over roasted vegetables. It sat there all day until I finally found myself without visitors and felt free to go and have a play outside.

The moon really is a beautiful thing and its craters appear in such clarity through whichever lens i happened to be using during the brief break in the cloud.

Deciding to capture the moment, I turned my camera bag upside down trying to look for the camera adapter lens that I’d bought a month ago. No sign. I hit myself about the head a few times, but this resolved nothing. All rather predictable.

Anyway, I must go. My eyelids are heavy ad the little feller is snoring.

Running buffet tomorrow. More washing up.

It’s 12.45am and I’m absolutely boiling hot. My brief wonder as to whether I was being consumed by demons and being dragged into the fiery pit fizzled out when I remembered that I’d turned the thermostat up after the end of the heating programme.

There’s a relief. Imagine trying to explain the burn mark on the carpet through the medium of Sally Morgan or Derek Acorah. “What’s that, Sammy? A little girl called Elizabeth, no, Mary? Elizabeth! What happened? What was the year? One, six, five, eight? A malevolent spirit, Richard? James? He use her for firewood? Oh no, that’s awful Sam. Thank you Sam.”

In reality, I’m a little overcome with stress having spent the evening with my parents. It was actually really nice; they enjoyed my food and engaged in the ritual preparation of the veg for Christmas dinner. We watched some TV together, my mum polished off two thirds of a bottle of wine. But all the time, I had my eye on the clock. I was fucking desperate for a cigarette and wanted to get them home before the shops closed, but time thwarted my craving. Curses! Curse me for never owning up to smoking to my parents, although I’m sure they must know. Curse me for having given up and for having none in the house.

Anyway.

ANY FUCKING WAY!

I’m sure I’ll wake up in a fine mood tomorrow, having been visited by three ghosts during the night.

Ghost of Christmas past:
1988: tubby
1989: tubbier
1990: watch it, Tina!
1991 – 1999: for fuck’s sake!
2000: FIVE STONE LIGHTER THAN LAST YEAR?
2001 – 2005: you’re looking too thin
2006: watch it, Tina.
2007: for fuck’s sake
2008 – 2009: just settle for this, but be careful
2010: you’ve done it again
2011: the coffee, cigs and depression diet really suits you

Ghost of Christmas present:
Oh deary me. Should you really even consider eating anything at all for the next couple of months? Still, you’ve put on this marvellous lunch for everyone and they’ll think you’re trying to poison them all if you don’t tuck in yourself. You aren’t trying to poison them all are you?

Look, you’ve got this fabulous new telescope, I’m sure there’ll be one clear night in the next three months when you might catch a glimpse of the moon’s craters. Unless it’s a new moon of course. Maybe you can use it to see what that weird bloke over the road gets up to. Don’t make it obvious that you’re spying on him though!

Ghost of Christmas future:
Well, one thing’s for certain, I’ll be dead at some point. It doesn’t really matter what sort of life you lead, but I suppose if you put stuff in, you get more out. Ultimately though, you could be the nicest person on earth, or a total bastard and whatever happens, you end up in the cold, cold earth.

This time last year, I was pissed out of my head on rum. Tonight, I’ve just got terrible indigestion, I’ve hurt my back and I have a craving for cigarettes that I won’t have access to until 7am when the shop over the road opens. There’s also an element of excitement. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, to having my family here, to acting the goat with my niece, to improvising methods of heating things without a microwave (there are these things called ovens, that I’ve heard are terribly good for the purpose).

I don’t have a timetable for tomorrow, so I guess other than getting the turkey into the oven on time, I’ll be winging it. Nothing new there then.

… work it out for yourself.

I could’ve sworn that was included in Jazzie’s Groove from Soul II Soul’s Club Classics vol 2, but anyway, it’s been and gone. In much the same way as the jar of haimisha pickles came and went this evening.

So today, I prepared for Christmas by covering my hob with sticky cranberry mess and by almost setting fire to my top oven. I’m not usually so disastrous in the kitchen, and I’ve no idea why I’ve suddenly turned into Rhea from Butterflies, but my nonchalance towards roasting the turkey is evaporating with every passing minute.

Why on earth did I think making cranberry sauce would be a good idea? This is one of those condiments that has never made it onto my family’s Christmas dinner table. For good reason too, because it’s bloody vile. It’s like some sort of earwaxy bitter joke that’s been made up by people who hate Christmas just to inject a little bit of vileness into the best meal of the year. I blame these bloody TV cooks who present their idealised world to millions. Yes, it would be lovely to be one of the people who get invited to one of Nigella’s or Jamie’s Christmas dinner parties, to sample that special world of theirs with all the accoutrements they embelish their dining tables with, but this is my Christmas, and my Christmas has never, ever included cranberry sauce. There’s no justification for including it this year, other than seeing the shiny berries on display in the supermarket the other night and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to incorporate just a little bit more unnecessary faff and stress into Christmas by making something that I know I don’t like from scratch? And here’s what happened:

Because my stupid bloody hob can’t do “simmer” the whole gelatinous (pectinous) gloop exploded the second I turned my back. Why does my stove do this? Why can’t the lowest setting of the gas ring be at a temperature that simmers and doesn’t burn things to fuck?

Then there was the ham, which I decided to cook in cider. It made absolutely no difference to the flavour whatsoever, so there goes another fiver. After “simmering” on the hob for an afternoon (i.e. alternating between vigorous boiling and doing sod all), it was ready to coat in a honey/mustard glaze and roast in the oven. The instructions said to roast at 220C for 30 minutes. My oven said, roast for any more than 15 minutes at 200C and I’ll self combust.

Such mess. Cooking generates such unwanted mess.

I’m forever cleaning down my hob, work surfaces and the tiling, especially at the back of the hob. There are a number of reasons for this: a) because I’m not a scumbag; b) because I like things to be clean; c) the kitchen smells if you don’t keep it clean.

There’s that greasy grime that coats all the surfaces in your kitchen after a while. Despite trying to keep on top of things on a daily basis, some areas do get neglected for months at a time, these being the cooker hood and the tops of my kitchen cupboards. With the propensity for stuff in kitchens to become coated in cack, why do people hang their utensils on the wall behind the hob? This is the prime place for stuff to get completely splattered with grease, covered in steamy and splashed with whatever the hell you’re cooking.

The more stuff there is on work surfaces, the more stuff that needs to be cleaned and cleaned underneath and around. Microwave? No. Toaster? Absolutely not. And don’t get me started on spoon rests and spice racks.

The final countdown
So tomorrow marks the beginning of the end. I need to buy a load of presents and wrap stuff, but that’s fine. The evening brings “veg prep” and turkey showdown round one.

Despite me “doing Christmas”, my folks are insisting that they do what they usually do in terms of prepping the meal for Christmas Day. I’m having them here for tea and we’ll be peeling and preparing vegetables over Carols from Kings and then stuffing the bird and readying it for cooking on Christmas Day.

I’m looking forward to it immensely. This is the first time I’ve ever done Christmas. I could be a total nob and try for a Nigella/Good Food/Jamie/Delia thing, but I actually quite like our Christmas the way we do it and I don’t really want any of that to change, cranberry nightmare aside of course.

So, it’s just about Christmas, three sleeps to go.

This year I have been rolling a couple of festive seasons into one, having essentially lost last Christmas due to, well, having my entire world fall apart around me. I guess I’ve been overcompensating, but what the hell, I’ve actually been enjoying the run up to the big day that’s three sleeps away.

There’s a gammon thing that’s soaking in cider and spices in a huge pot, waiting to be cooked tomorrow. Cranberries are in the fridge: they’ll be turned into some sort of jelly that I won’t touch with a bargepole. The outhouse is playing host to bags of sprouts, carrots, potatoes, parsnips… and a swede… that will all be turned into edible delights (with the exception of the carrots and swede) on Christmas Day. The turkey arrives tomorrow and I’ve cleared and cleaned the fridge in preparation for it.

I am going to try to make this festive period special, because it is. I have my beautiful niece, six in March. She’s at that perfect age when everything should be magical. Next year, I’ve no idea how Christmas will feel for her, so I need to make this year as good as possible. In conjunction with this is the uncertainty surrounding the health of my parents. They’ll probably be absolutely fine next year and for many years to come, but I can only be certain of their health this Christmas. Nanna + Nonno + Little Con = magical Christmas 2012.

Now, here’s the question: is my enthusiasm for this Christmas some sort of distraction from the fact that I’m terribly lonely and so desperate to have the love of my life back with me? Possibly. Would I give up this Christmas for a chance of having her back? Yes? No, actually, no I wouldn’t*. There are few things that we can rely on in our lives. The only thing that I’ve ever been able to rely on is my family. My stupid, argumentative, irritating, borderline-dysfunctional family.

People can tell you they love you; they’ll look you in the eyes with a look that can surely only be reserved for you alone, and they’ll tell you they love you. Unfortunately, words are just words for some, what matters is knowing that the people whom you find so exasperating, so fucking embarrassing, so making you wish you were adopted, it’s knowing that these irritating bastards are always there for you. And I am duty-bound to love them and be there for them, and smile, and shout. Because that’s what we do.

Love is agony. It’s a real, physical pain that is only ever relieved when you are with the person who you love. In those special moments when you are together, the agony is transformed into joy, contentment, being: you are whole when in the presence of that most special person. I’ve spent a year dealing with the agony and I’m happy to admit that I’m still in a lot of pain, having a whole lump of something torn from my being. But I guess I’ve been lucky in that I’ve become the recipient of a big bundle of joy from a beautiful little girl who is slightly embarrassed to be with me. My work with her is done.

A postscript
*I’m in the strange emotional hinterland where I’m almost letting go, accepting singledom as my destiny and I’m kind of OK with that, but my goodness, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t take her back. You don’t proclaim somebody to be the love of your life easily, unless you’re a total moron, so when you find “the one” it’s so terribly difficult to believe that there could ever be another who is truly deserving of that title. But “the one” wasn’t deserving in the end anyway.

I shall go away and punch myself in the head for a while. Much easier to cope with than love and the scars don’t last too long either.

Wild animals are just that – wild. Their undomesticability (I’m sure there’s a proper word for this) adds to their allure.

Over the years, I have drawn up a list of non-human friends who I’d love to come and join me in my happy fantasy world. Included would be:

All on that list are achievable with the exception of hares and bats. These majestic creatures just are. They can’t be persuaded to live in a habitat designed by stupid humans. They are wild and free.

I once had the privilege of witnessing a hare running along a country lane up in the Northumberland. It was about 10pm, but the proximity to the summer solstice and the latitude afforded levels of light that would normally be preserved for much earlier in the evening. I drove a beautiful car (obviously not mine) at high speed (for me) along country lanes and suddenly, he was there, darting out from a field, running along the road in front of me. Such grace and speed, accentuated by his magnificent ears. And no sooner as I’d seen him, he’d gone again.

From that moment on, I wanted to be amongst the hares. They’ll never be domesticated, their ears are too good for that. Having a hare as a pet would be akin to trying to tie down a cloud or taming the sea. Futile.

So I shall remember my encounter that June evening a few years ago, and I shall regret not being able to slow him down to ask whether I could friend him on Facebook. Imagine that. Just imagine being friends with the magnificent.

I don’t think I’ve got lung cancer; I’m not a smoker, so I can’t have it. Actually, I stopped smoking last Wednesday evening when I decided not to buy any more fags after finishing a packet: I reckon it’s the best way of giving up: no prolonged reliance on nicotine through the various interventions that make you want to pull your own skin off or that taste like minty earwax, all the time, tying you to the drug that you’re trying to escape from.

On employing the power of Google to help me decide that I probably have a terminal malignancy, I started to feel a burning pain in my left lung. This is it, it’s DEFINITELY cancer. I convinced myself, especially also because I’m off for a chest x-ray on Wednesday evening (in a Ford Transit, at a Library). Anyway, over the course of the weekend, the diffuse pain on the left side of my thorax has concentrated somewhat… to my stomach. So it seems that a case of indigestion probably isn’t cancer afterall.

In all fairness, I have been in a lot of discomfort with my foodbag, and I am a hopeless doom merchant (I have my mum to thank for this) so it’s sort of understandable that I’d expect the absolute worst while not being particularly bothered about hoping for the best.

Anyway, more blood tests tomorrow that will probably show that I’m absolutely fine and that the machine that does the analysis at the hospital has had a clean and a calibration.

I’m really hot.

Probably pancreatitis.

But my temperature’s only reading 36.4! This is what happens when you have a brain tumour.

As much as I joke about being slightly Asperger’s I know that I am not. It’s like saying you’re slightly pregnant or slightly dead. I just have certain way about me that might make people think that I have difficulties in certain situations that people take for granted.

Here’s a frexample: personal space. I am not happy having any social interaction when somebody is within one arm’s length of me. Any closer than that equals a) FUCKING WEIRDO ALERT, or b) this is getting a bit whatsit, brace yourself!

This does not mean that I have Asperger’s syndrome, it means that I am normal. Unfortunately, my reaction to people invading my personal space might not adhere to standard operating procedures: whereas some people can deal with it, knowing it’s only a temporary discomfort, I find myself backing away, even reclining in my stance or undertaking evasive circular movements to avoid any further breaches of those very important twenty or so inches. In extreme circumstances, I’ve had to hold out my arm and tell the perpetrator that “this” is my limit “back the fuck away from me!”. It doesn’t go down too well on a first date, but it worked quite effectively with a Celtic colleague who was just simply very affectionate and at ease with everybody he met (until he met me).

But why do people invade others’ personal space anyway? Surely those who were brought up in the same society have the same sorts of tolerance limits to what’s acceptable. Any encroachment on this indicates that they were brought up by elves or that they’re just not quite right in the head. Why don’t they realise that people are backing away from them? This indicates a total lack of social awareness that might be attributed to somebody with Asperger’s, but somebody with Asperger’s would never get that close to somebody – they’d be in a different room, texting their way through a conversation so as to avoid any sort of personal contact, just like I do.

I’m going to reintroduce my “Experimentals” series, whereby I test stuff out.

I shall take a statistically, proper group of weirdos participants and measure how close they are when they talk to people in stood-up conversations. This shall be measured against a number of other factors:

It is hypothesised that there will be a high correlation between distance from victim and other stupidly annoying habits. I will publish my findings in Nature Gossip, You Magazine and Take a Break. I think a meeting with the PM is in order too because let’s face it, celebrities who are stupid enough not to change their voicemail PIN then complain when they get hacked by the newspapers who give them the publicity they crave can get a meeting in Number 10 and they’re just whinging fuckwits. Millions of people are affected by personal space invasion on a daily basis, yet our plight remains ignored. It’s a huge, huge problem.

The Killing
It’s over. I can’t believe it. One of the best crime dramas ever to have graced our screens and it’s all over.

In tribute to Sarah Lund and her magnificent jumpers, here’s one that I have my eye on in the Scandinavian jumper store in Keswick.

She never got close to anyone either,

It’s very hard not to correct one’s mistakes. Try it while typing. That’s if you type stuff of course.

I recall once in the original blog, I composed an entire post without correcting my typing or spelling errors. I’ll attmept to ecopy it here.

Difficulty eH?

ArrrghhH!

Anyway, getting a grip, I shall contiune. Of course, it doesn’t help that my fingernails are slightlu too long for typing (the just one of the consequences of not hainv g a girlfirend and the moment). Meh, ths is rubbish. I m shattering an illusions here that I’m an impeccable typist.

Ok, back to normal now before this whole thing becomes illegible.

While performing the simplest task such as composing an e-mail, or a blog post, we subconsciously continually correct what we’re doing to produce text that makes sense, that conforms to the rules of grammar and spelling (as best we know how to interpret them) and to show respect for the recipient or intended reader.

Even though there are loads of mistakes in the paragraphs above, the reader can still sort of make sense of what’s going on, they can navigate around the typos and get the gist. With this being the case, why bother with language rules at all? So what if people don’t follow the rules?

What if people make different errors, such that one doesn’t know how to form sentences, another doesn’t know the rules of apostrophes, somebody else is consistently poor at spelling, others communicate in txt spk lol? What becomes of the written language then? It fragments into lots of sublanguages that nobody understands. Nobody would be roflmaoing then, would they?

Or maybe people just wouldn’t give a shit.

Rules and guides are in place in societies to provide a framework for acceptable behaviour. (I’ve not used that particular ‘F’ word since I worked in the NHS *flashbacks to writing bollocks for a living*). People start deviating from the rules and others start to get irked, angry, jealous, vengeful even.

With the final push to Christmas coming, I foresee the manners of many being pushed aside by a few who don’t think that queuing is for them. These people are the equivalent of those who don’t care that plurals don’t have apostrophes, that pens and paper are stationery and c u l8r is just plain fucking lazy.

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, it’s OK to let these people be, forget about them and mount our own moral high horses and proclaim that we’re better than them. But they pushed in and got the last parking space at the supermarket, they filled their trolley with all the bread rolls just in case, they bumped you out of the way in the booze aisle then, with their trolley overflowing, jumped to the till that was just opening when they could see that you only had a few bits.

Is it right that these people should get away with it? Hell no! I’d like to call on all decent folk out there to become intolerant of rule breaking, to amass a virtual army of red pens, striking lines through the poor grammar and spelling that blight our society and putting an end to lazy apostrophe’s. (It really hurt me to do that)

I’m ever so slightly quite pissed. This should be fun!

For some reason, I fancied having a drink tonight and ended up finishing off a bottle of rather nice port that I was supposed to be saving for Christmas.

Note for future: do not buy booze unless intended recipients are no more than 18 hours away. I have a legendary lack of self control.

It was very nice, and although my head seems to be working ok at the moment, my eye to hand coordination has gone to poopy. I will want to die when I wake up sometime tomorrow morning.

I was going to watch a film via the wonders of internet tellyboxviewing this evening, only the film I wanted to watch was on the LoveFilm service that you can’t play through your telly pile of shite waste of money. I ended up watching a film that I’d seen at the cinema with my ex ex ex Jo and her sister and brother-in-law a few years ago. Odd that this was on since we’d been engaged in a text exchange about certain friends of mine who insist on send Christmas cards to her place, despite the fact that I’ve told them of my new address on a number of occasions.

This got me to thinking about Christmas cards that I receive. I am very thankful of all of them and of the sentiment around them, however, the senders’ style standards don’t often match with mine, because I receive so few, there’s not enough Christmas card ‘noise’ to drown out the really hideous ones. I’d rather just put a card up of my own choosing instead of certain ones I receive through the post.

Oh I’m so tired and drunk, I really must sleeep or I’lll spend all of tomroww regretting this.