A few thoughts - Christmas 2020

Christmas Day 2020, dawned bright, sunny and cold – good conditions for leaving bottles of beer, or other drinks that are best served cool, to chill on the back step. With both fridges well-stocked, additional cooling capacity is much welcomed.

The kitchen cupboards are also full to bursting point, which makes me believe Mrs PBT’s is expecting a siege, but she’s been steadily accumulating non-perishable items, in a bid not to get caught out by the ridiculous panic buying that accompanied the first national lockdown, at the end of March. We didn’t get “caught out” of course, apart from not being able to obtain pasta or bread flour for a short period, but I’m sure there’s something in the female psyche that goes with the hunter-gatherer instinct, to make sure the family doesn’t go hungry.

No immediate danger of that then, and we’re not going to go thirsty either (at least Matthew or I won’t), as there’s sufficient beer indoors to float the proverbial battleship! A fair amount of it arrived as gifts from family and friends, including a 5 litre mini keg of Larkin’s Porter that I’m not even contemplating opening until the New Year, but if the weather does turn colder, the porter will be most welcome, as will the myriad of other dark beers I’ve managed to accumulate.

As for the event itself, there were just the three of us sitting down to an excellent roast turkey dinner. Nothing to do with government “guidelines” it’s been like this for quite a few years, and I’m certainly not complaining. When I first moved in with, and later married, Mrs PBT’s her sister and brother-in-law used to host a big family dinner at their house in High Brooms.

We occasionally reciprocated, but as nephews and nieces grew up and flew the nest, to start families of their own, parents either died or, in the case of my mum and dad, retired to some far-flung corner of the kingdom (Norfolk), we changed to spending Christmas Day at home. Eileen’s brother, and his late wife, joined us for a few years, as did a friend of mine who lived on his own, but now there’s just the three of us and we really, we prefer it this way.

I didn’t over-indulge in either food or drink this year, not having a second helping certainly assisted on the food front, and drink wise I was remarkably restrained. I kicked off with a couple cans of Pilsner Urquell. This classic and original Pilsner has become my “go-to” beer for drinking at home, then, to go with my dinner I opted for a bottle of Fuller’s 1845. This fine, full-bodied amber ale has accompanied my Christmas dinner for more years than I care to remember, and rarely does it disappoint.

 I’d perhaps left the bottle out on the step for too long, as the beer was rather too cold to start with, but once it had warmed up, it was fine. I’d planned to go on to a few other beers afterwards, and cooling on the back doorstep were Schlenkerla Rauchbier from Bamberg, St Austell Proper Job, plus a couple of beers from Belgian brewer Fort Lapin; a relatively new outfit who are based in Bruges.

I picked up a selection of these beers, which include the classic Belgian trio of Dublel, Tripel and Quadrupel, during our brief visit ashore at Zeebrugge, on last year’s “taster cruise” on board the Cunard Queen Elizabeth. I hadn’t heard of the brewery at the time, but the bottles caught my eye in a gift shop, at Zeebrugge’s cruise terminal.

The cruise was my last trip abroad, unless you count last January’s business visit to Scotland, or the trip Eileen and I made to South Wales, the following month for a family funeral as visiting foreign parts? A planned cruise to Hamburg last May was cancelled as a result of the pandemic, as was a beer enthusiast’s visit to Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. 2020 was the first time in ages that my holiday plans had been so far advanced, only to all come adrift,  so for obvious reasons there’s nothing definite yet planned for 2021!

A quick word about Christmas dinner and, given some of the “horror stories” that circulate each year about turkeys “going off” before they are cooked, full marks to Waitrose & Partners. For the past decade or so, we have ordered our Christmas “bird” from Messrs. Wait & Rose, and they have always come up trumps.

We normally buy a fresh turkey, rather than a frozen one, as it takes all the hassle out of de-frosting. I left the ordering a bit late this year, or rather I didn’t, as I it was a similar date to previous years that I went online. I was forgetting that this year, there had been a major cull of thousands of turkeys, due to an outbreak of bird-flu affecting several Norfolk poultry farms.

I ended up purchasing a free-range, Norfolk bronze feathered turkey crown. The name doesn’t mean much to me, but the price was quite a bit more than I would normally have paid. That was all that was available, so needs must and all that, I stumped up the readies and do have to say that it was worth the extra. Full of flavour, tender and succulent, so much so that each slice almost melts in one’s mouth.

Served up with plenty of roast potatoes, roast parsnips, sprouts, chestnuts, red cabbage, pigs in blankets, bread sauce and plenty of gravy, Mrs PBT’s had certainly done us proud. I resisted the temptation for seconds, a mentioned earlier, as I wanted room inside this year, for the Christmas pudding. We waited until the washing up was done, before starting on the pudding.

Later in the evening, we opened up a bottle of port to accompany the cheese selection we’d accumulated in the run-up to the festive season. The port had been kicking around from several Christmases ago, and I’d only intended to have the one glass. Talk about the best laid plans because I had several and thought better of switching back to beer afterwards.

There was the usual dross on the TV; I wouldn’t have switched the damn thing on, but Mrs PBT’s is something of a tele-addict. With a screening of seemingly every Carry-On film ever made, the news on continuous loop and the Vicar of Dibley having to endure four Christmas dinners; an episode that makes me feel ill just thinking about it, there was little to properly entertain and nothing to stimulate the mind.  I have the entire second series of “His Dark Materials” to catch up with on iplayer but disappearing to watch some of these episodes on my PC, would have been rather anti-social of me – however tempting!

I hadn’t much reading material available either. Roger Protz’s book on the “Family Brewers of Britain,” still hasn’t arrived, despite being ordered well in advance of Christmas, and I’ve nearly finished the 12 novel, four volume set of “A Dance to the Music of Time.” I am therefore desperately in need of some new reading material.

Finally, the good news announced on Christmas Eve that, against all the odds, a free-trade deal had finally been agreed between the UK and the EU, has given us all something to cheer about; whichever side of the Brexit divide one stands.  For once Johnson managed to get something right, so credit where it’s due, even if it was achieved, very much at the 11^th hour.

Perhaps we can all move on now, after four and a half years of uncertainty, but next time major constitutional change is proposed, the party behind the proposals should at least have some idea of what they want and how they intend to achieve it!

On that note, I wish everyone a happy, peaceful, prosperous and above all healthy New Year.