We had a few friends around for Christmas. Being Irish, I over-catered by a factor of roughly twenty-five. We could have comfortably fed a football team along with their wives and mistresses.
For a week prior to the event, there was plenty of bulgy-eyed, tongue-clenched concentration applied to almond paste, frosted icing, and pastry the lightness and fluffiness of which defied all laws of physics and human expectation.
Unfortunately, I applied a little too much ambition to the minced pie production. Having prepared the mince, I spent hours trying to wrestle flour, castor sugar, butter and eggs into something resembling pastry after which I decided I really couldn’t be arsed twaddling around with pastry cutters and bun-trays. I therefore – sensibly, I felt – decided to fashion a Freakily Large Minced Pie, as opposed to several individual pies.
When I proudly presented my Freakily Large Minced Pie, Husband found it almost hilarious enough to merit its own stand-up comedy show. But – “Seriously though, Niamhie” – he decreed that individual minced pies were compulsory for Christmas Day.
He got very Hollywood-In-Its-Heyday Movie-Star-ish about it: “But you can’t, Darling, you simply CAN’T. I won’t HEAR of it.”
Not to be dissuaded by my argument that there is no difference between a Freakily Large Minced Pie and several small minced pies except, well, the SIZE, Andrew bought some frozen shortcrust pastry that he spent ages pressing ever-so-precisely into bun-cases.
[He made a right mess of my kitchen].
[What is it about men? All Andrew has to do is step into the kitchen and there are crumbs over every level counter top, evil viscous brown drips adorning every receptacle, and a mountain of crockery quivering in the sink].
Unfortunately, he neglected to cook the pastry cases before spooning in the mince (I wasn’t about to suggest pre-cooking, since I was still sulking over his mocking my Freakily Large Minced Pie) so the bottoms were soggy.
With a maximum of confidence allied with a minimum knowledge of the operation of an oven, Andrew decided the most effective way of eradicating sogginess was to grill the pie bottoms.
I’m struggling to remain objective here, but really: when it comes down to a choice between a slice of Freakily Large Minced Pie and a Freakily Crunchy Minced Pie With Char . . . well, all I’m saying is: I know which one I’d choose.
On the day itself, we drank our way through several gallons of mulled wine, crunched down copious amounts of chestnuts, and gnawed our way through a vast Christmas Cake (with real almond paste and shiny white icing, you will note). It was not exactly your traditional Christmas – although in Dubai it never is. The sun shone. John and Andrew smoked hubbly bubbly on the balcony. The minced pies were crunchy.
However, we did eat far too much food, and there was a Christmas tree, and presents. So some things were pretty seasonal.
I had awful difficulty buying Andrew presents, and being Andrew, he wasn’t dropping many hints. We had a big “What do you want for Christmas?” discussion, and apart from a Ferrari, a property in Monte Carlo and an adjustable steering dampener for his motorbike, Andrew was spectacularly unforthcoming. I tried to acquire the latter on a trip to London since you cannot buy steering dampeners here, but no joy. And knowing Andrew, I’d have got a steering dampener with a single helix dual-spring action, when in fact he actually wanted one with triple side-motion bevel-swivel. Or, you know, whatever.
In the end, I stuck to some fairly simple options: a leather sports bag, a Disk Doctor for repairing scratched CDs and DVDs, a rather Andrew-looking aluminium CD case and a portable mug.
Embarrassingly, Andrew had about twice as many presents for me, but in my defense I had dropped several well-placed hints along the way – along the lines of:-
“Can you get me a 7mm wetsuit please, size ten, thanks.”
Which was altogether more helpful than Andrew.
Mind you, he’d also – bizarrely – got me a tub of bath salts, so he evidently struggled at some point.
On New Years Eve we went around to John and Hazel’s for a fairly relaxed dinner. There was a lavish amount of wine consumed. At midnight, we climbed a ladder onto the roof of their building and watched the fireworks go off around the city. It was a magical, magical evening – as demonstrated by the fact that nobody broke their necks coming back down the ladder. That might have been more a miracle than magic
