Food for thought

28th November 2021

I wouldn’t stop what you are doing as I won’t be taking up much of your time this week, the past seven days being of stunning mundaneness as we go about our daily business in weather that has been more than disappointingly grey. In the past we have been able to rely on November to be cold but crisp, with plenty of sunshine during the day, but this year the overall trend has been towards the dull and damp.

There was, however, promise of a brighter time ahead, even if manmade, when on driving through MSP to the main square on Tuesday morning we passed the men putting up the Christmas lights. Nor was that the only sign of the imminent arrival of Advent as when we went into Pina for our pre-shopping breakfast it was to see in the window and on shelves just inside the door a display of Dolce and Gabbana panettone. They came in a variety of flavour combinations, mostly centred round chocolate, some boxed and some in a tin. Stephen seemed most taken with the somewhat unseasonal marriage of Sicilian citrus fruit and saffron in a round time more reminiscent of majolica wear than anything faux Dickensian. We didn’t ask the price, thereby avoiding the dilemma of weighing up whether an urban chic style statement was worth taking out a mortgage on.

In what turned out to be the most exciting day of the week, Stephen for something to do took a look on the vaccination site to see what it said about booster jabs, and discovered that he was eligible. Losing no time he booked himself in for next Monday morning before offering to sort one for me. This had a rather different result as the earliest appointment I could get was for next February – the difference being that as Stephen had the one-shot Johnson and Johnson in June, his six months were up before mine as I had to return in August for my second dose. So while he will be boosted in less a week than I have to wait till 14.00 on February 2nd, though it was some consolation, which some might call a bit sad, that I will be boosted at 2pm 2.2.22.

The rest of the week panned out almost less excitingly, though we did manage a night out on Friday, joining Marco and Maddalena for dinner at Pomo d’oro. I can’t think when we were last there, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is over a year. Comfortingly, nothing much had changed, though the menu downloaded to our phones, as seems to be the usual case wherever you go these days, seemed to have been streamlined a little (maybe to make scrolling on a small screen more user-friendly) and, to Maddalena’s intense delight, had the addition to the primi piatti of tortellini in brodo. We ordered this between three of us, Marco preferring to skip straight to a carnivorous secondo and thereby missing a definite treat.

As for the weekend, contrary to the recent trend, we have spent it in splendid isolation at LCDDB, and it would have been quite unremarkable if not for watching, on Netflix yesterday evening, maybe the worst film either of us has ever seen. With being out on Friday, we shifted pizza night to Saturday, meaning that we were able to settle down on the settee and watch Father Christmas is Back in one sitting, rather than split it into two which is what we usually do with a film. This is just as well, for if we had done so, we probably wouldn’t have bothered with the second part - unless it was to confirm how bad it really was.

If I tell you that one of the least preposterous things about it was that Elizabeth Hurley (56) was playing a woman in her mid-40s (which she might just about have got away with if they had been content with the copious shots of her cleavage and dispensed with the close-ups of her face) while her parents were Caroline Quentin (61) and Kelsey Grammer (66). The presence of John Cleese might have suggested a certain standard, but I think he must just have fancied the idea of appearing in something with a pillow stuffed up his jumper, either that or too much of the good life has drastically affected the shape of his body.

It did, though, serve us right, for it is an unwritten rule that nothing to do with Christmas is entertained until 1stDecember at the earliest in the Webster-Firth household, and no decorations appear before double figures are reached. The fact that we fudged our own rule and watched a festive film just proves that anything to do with the season of peace and goodwill to all men belongs in the twelfth month of the year and not sometime in early autumn. There is, of course, an exception for Brussels sprouts, which need to be on a low light from Easter.