And so we went to the airport in Carcassonne yesterday to collect our six visitors for the Christmas- we have hired an extra car for the occasion. Now Carcassonne airport is very small and the area next to the luggage turntable is immediatly accessible to the outside- covered with warnings about how NO WAY one is allowed access. But as always the minute the first person passes through we all crowd in to greet the arrivals. We can then see them through a window queueing up at the immigration counter. As soon as our lot rounded the counter we spotted them, they were holding the two small lads aloft and they spotted us, I could see (but not hear) them shreiking our names. Síle took one look at me “Don’t you dare cry” she hissed.I tried hard not to.
And then they were through and Fionn the four year old leaped up on me and hugged.
My eye was cought by a French man just next to us staring unashamedly, a beatific beam on his face and his eyes full of tears.

Last Monday we finally broke down and admitted that we would have to order a load of logs for the stove for Christmas.
Now the man who supplies our logs is a fairly tough piece of work, as you would expect a professional hewer of wood to be, and gruff, would be a polite way to describe his manner. The sort of man you would imagine would slice off a finger and then sellotape it back on and keep chopping.
Anyway we phoned his wife on Monday and ordered three stares of timber. Madame said that “There is no way you can have that before Christmas” but then she always says that and ten minutes later Monsieur rang and said he would be over in a half hour.
He was.
Then, after he had emptied his lorryfull of wood on the road outside the house, he said “You were lucky, as tonight I have to go to hospital, the heart” (tapping the appropriate area) Ah ! said the voice of experience”An angiogram” ” Yes” said Monsieur paling visibly”They tell me they have to put a tube up here”- pointing again, this time in the direction of his groin and wincing. “Does it hurt much” he then said with some pathos. “Not a bit” says I, “they pump drugs into you while they are at it and you feel great, I sang ” (quite true) Monsieur’s face brightened and cleared. “Is it like alcohol ? he said “Mais Oui” I said raising an imaginary glass. Monsieur smiled with relief, banged his hands together and drove off. Then I noticed that there was an entire line of traffic waiting on our lane. They were patiently watching our strange conversation and mime unable to pass Monsieur’s lorry.
I smiled apologetically as they passed.
They waved in acknowledgement.

Before I head off to the airport in Carcassonne this morning to collect Ma Toute Famille I had to call down to the butchers for the Christmas Meats.
So at 7.30 (this is France) down I headed (I had to collect a Turkey, A Goose AND a Ham).
The shop was en fete pour La Noel, where previously lurked the pork chops and lambs liver now were Ballotines and Galintines, Boned stuffed Pheasant, Pates en Croute,Foi Gras of every variety, Bouchees de La Reine, beautiful salads in Renaissance colours, and proudly M. Boutonnier showed me this years speciality, tiny eclairs stuffed with Pate de Foi Gras. I had to back my car to the door then to collect the boxes and when I got back to the shop they were all at the door ready to pack me into the car, and while other traffic waited patiently, hugs,handshakes and kisses were exchanged with cries of Bonnes Fetes and Joyeoux Noel.
This is my first Christmas in France!

Olive oil, Sourdough Pain Campagne ready for breakfast on Christmas morning with Smoked Salmon from Ireland and the best Scrambled Eggs.
Who needs Turkey ? (We’ll be having Goose anyway.)

Necessity is not only the mother of invention but sometimes it becomes the fairy god-mother too. Take Hummous, or to be specific, take Tahini. When we moved out here first I couldn’t find any anywhere (I have now but its too late) so, I decided if I was to continue to enjoy Hummous I would have to make my own Tahini paste. The results were and are spectacular, moving the Hummous up a whole gear of taste sensations.
Here’s what you do to make your own Tahini. Fry about six tablespoons of sesame seeds in a tablespoon of sesame (or olive) oil along with a heaped teaspoon of whole cumin seeds. Do this slowly on a gentle heat until the seeds turn beige and then golden. Tip these into a liquidizer (a food processor won’t do the job finely enough) and whizz (adding more oil if necessary) until it becomes smooth- can take a while. Voila ; Tahini. Now add this and lemon juice, salt pepper and garlic to your cooked (or tinned) chick peas and put into a processor until smooth(ish) chill, and then spread on hot pitta bread, toast or crackers and feel your taste buds tingle. Great standby for the Christmas.

Christmas 1977
Síle and I had come home from England in 1977 with the infant Caitriona and no jobs to go to.
It was in one of Irelands many eras of recession but we were determined, in our innocence, to try and start up a business on our own and to that end, just before Christmas, we had rented a little farm cottage in Bishops Demesne about two miles outside Kilkenny with an eye to see if we could find a premises in that town to rent to start up a small restaurant.

We were of course totally broke, our only income was the dole which, after we had paid our rent didn’t leave a whole lot over for luxuries.
Strangely I don’t remember being in the least depressed about that as we headed into that Christmas. This was mainly because, having spent the previous months staying with various relations, we were at last on our own in our very first house.

Our only method of transport was Síle’s bike, preserved from her schooldays ,and I clearly remember riding the bike into Kilkenny to hire a set of chimney brushes to clear out the flue in the little parlour of the cottage which was totally blocked with nests.
Having swept the chimney I was able to carry the brushes back strapped to the bike like a proper sweep.

About three days before Christmas we had an amazing windfall.
A card arrived from my mother and inside it was £100 in cash.

In the card she told that it was not from her (she wouldn’t have had it to give anyway) but that she was sworn to secrecy as to the donor but her instructions were that we were to be told to spend it on Christmas.

This was a huge sum of money at the time, and (as we were properly sensible of our shaky finances) we headed off into Kilkenny immediately with the bike and the child in the buggy determined to spend as much of it as we could.
I can still clearly remember the journey back from town, we had a case of red wine (called, as I remember it, Le Pot de Patron) balanced on the handlebars of the bike and somewhere on the carrier we had a small wooden rocking horse for Caitriona.
We had also managed to buy and carry a turkey and all the trimmings and these were laden in the buggy with Caitriona.
We were monarchs of all we saw and I don’t believe I have ever since felt as affluent.

I can still remember that Christmas as one of great happiness.

About three months later my mother came to visit and told us where our Christmas windfall had come from.

My mother’s best friend since childhood was a lady called Mickey O Keeffe, she and Mum had played hockey and tennis together and then had both been involved together in the Girl Guides.
That Christmas Mickey was in hospital very ill with cancer and my mother used to visit her every day.
As I was always the apple of my mother’s eye she obviously whiled away a lot of the time telling Mickey about me and Síle.

According to my mother about a week before Christmas Mickey gave my mother a cheque for £100 with instructions to send it on to us to spend it on Christmas.
The only condition was that my mother was sworn to silence on the identity of the donor.

The only reason that my mother thought herself free at this later stage to name her was that Mickey had died shortly after Christmas.

I bought this for a few Euros in the local supermarket this morning, then spent an hour trying to photograph it. It is such a pretty and simple piece of glass.

Today Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker had this to say.

“After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.
Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.
And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)
So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.
The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.
All of that is a truth, plain and simple, and recognized throughout the world. At some point, this truth may become so bloody obvious that we will know it, too. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.”

Brilliant ! Síle can knit the trees, I’ll provide the corks- how many days to Christmas ?