Christmas Eve

The gammon is simmering in a pan with celery, onion, cloves and bay leaves, and L is making cranberry sauce with clementines and port to go with the turkey tomorrow. The turkey is currently residing in the back of the car! The carols on Radio 4 have just finished. In a couple of hours we shall go down to town for the carols in the Square. Hopefully they won't go on longer than half an hour, since the forecast is now for -11C tonight! We'll go for a drink with friend S and then return to glaze, bake and eat the gammon with a nice bottle of red wine.

I am having a strange and moving time reading my father's letters home to his parents from his time in the army from 1945-1947, based in Italy, Greece and Palestine. He was called up and joined the ranks just 28 days before the end of the War, and then had to wait over two years to be demobilized. He was 20 in 1945. I have had these letters for years in a pink cardboard folder, and never read them. I cannot explain why. It's a very intense experience - a meeting across time and beyond death, with a young man I feel I both do and do not know... He is sensitive, thoughtful to a fault, devours books and writes about them, an aspiring writer, wildly idealistic, a Christian with a strict moral code, also a Communist by inclination if not affiliation. He's lonely and anxious and completely out of his social comfort zone as a trooper in the British army. When I have read them all and had time to digest them, I will try to write more about them here.

In the mean time, Merry Christmas everyone! Enjoy peace, feasting and kindness, and I hope 2011 brings us all many blessings.