A Cook’s Christmas

The opening scene in Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It has our heroine distressing supermarket mince pies with a rolling pin in the hope that other parents at the school carol concert will presume them home-made. I loved her for that, just as I did the Calendar Girl who wins the cake competition with an M&S sponge. It’s years since I made a mince pie. And a fair few since I boned the turkey, stuffed it with ham and chestnuts and got up at dawn to set the pudding boiling.

For donkey’s years I did all that, and pressganged friends and family into hanging the Christmas tree with Quality Street sweets lovingly threaded with cotton; decorating every inch of the house with garlands of greenery from the garden; stringing the cherry tree in the drive with hundreds of light-polluting bulbs; and carol-singing with the neighbours. I even marshalled live donkeys and livelier children into nativity plays, and enjoyed it all quite as much as the children did.