Chrimbo is a thing. It’s a British word for Christmas-time. I’ve seen it in TV and magazine ads, and I’ve heard it referenced on the radio. It can’t be that they’re trying to shorten the word: both Christmas and Chrimbo have two syllables. How odd.

Other Christmas oddities: you know Bill Nighy’s character in Love Actually? Well, having ‘UK Christmas No 1’ is really a thing. It’s announced each year whose song has been named No 1, and it seems a group called Ladbaby has won the last five years in a row. God, I’m old.

Department store Christmas TV commercials are much anticipated, with John Lewis’s being the biggy. They’re discussed at water coolers and covered in the mainstream news media.

Red cabbage, like Brussel Sprouts, is a must at the Christmas dinner: I counted seven separate recipes in: the Guardian, the BBC news, and British morning TV shows. (My host’s was very good; I had seconds.)

Mince tarts are practically a religion. Enclosed or open? Sugar-dusted or not? Shortcrust pastry or shortbread casing? With nuts or without? Feelings run strong.

Everyone is so kind. Neighbours of my cousins invited the family (myself included) for Christmas dinner. Which, by the way, is served in the early afternoon in England, and is called lunch.

There were seven of us, so we had a little parade marching down the street, the young men carrying dining chairs, my cousin with the appetizers, and I (of course) had the champers.

Dinner was amazing – turkey (obvs), roast tatties, brussel sprouts, homemade cranberry sauce (Delia Smith’s recipe), parmesan-breaded parsnips (OMG – they were magnificent), gravy, and bread sauce. Bread sauce is a uniquely British condiment, served with poultry, and comprised of nothing more than bread, onion, and milk, cooked into a thin gruel-like consistency. I may not be selling it well; Brits love it but in my experience, North Americans, well, not so much. Oh and my cousin just reminded me of the braised red cabbage – it was very good and it seems it’s de rigeur on every Christmas dinner table.

The plum pud was quite the dramatic finale: our host’s son was in charge of lighting the pudding. But none of this ‘pour over the brandy and get out the BBQ lighter crap’: at the head of the table he heated the brandy in a large silver spoon held over a candle, tilting it ever so slightly to catch the flame and light up, then tipped it on to the pudding, all while being coached by the other nine guests at the top of their lungs. Ah, tradition.

I’m not sure the post-dinner board game involving Fascists and Liberals is equally traditional, but it was fun nonetheless. Perhaps my cousin and I shouldn’t have stayed up another three hours drinking champagne and talking, but you’ll be pleased to hear we have solved most of the world’s problems.

All in all, the best Christmas I have had since COVID.

I understand I’ve missed the “North American Storm of the Century”. It looked pretty scary, with power outages and pile-ups. I hope everyone who reads this had a safe and happy holiday.

Things were a tad less dramatic here in the south of England. My wonderful cousins took me and the dogs out for a walk (that wasn’t well worded) this afternoon. It was a very different Christmas Eve from last year, and an equally different one from what I’ve experienced in Canada.

Last year at this time, in spite of a kind invitation from said cousins to spend the holidays with them, I’d been too intimidated to drive anywhere other than the relatively barren roads of the Highlands to venture down here. And there was Omicron. So 365 days ago, I was sitting in the lobby of the Oban Hotel, social distancing, admiring the view, and reading a book, all whilst on a typical British Coach Tour Holiday. It was fine, but hardly festive.

But today was also quite different from what I’ve experienced every other Christmas Eve of my life (all of which were spent in southern Ontario). We still did the lazy late-morning-breakfast-running-into-lunch, and, just as back home, took the dogs for a walk. Unlike Canada’s current snowed-in status, the south of England is having a very green Christmas (let’s face it, when we say we’re having a ‘green Christmas’ in the GTA, we really mean we’re having a dull browny beige & grey Christmas). My youngest cousin is an avid rider, with her horse Pete stabled just near here, so she was off on the traditional Christmas Eve horsey pub crawl. It’s a thing. Hunh.

We brought the dogs – Hector is my cousin’s adorable little Lakeland Terrier (see Instagram) – and met the riders on Keston Common. Much of the local English population was there, sitting on the patios of the village pubs and cafes, or standing about on the common, chatting with friends and feeding the horses carrots. The riders had their pints while the horses nibbled on the grass, and it was all so very, very . . . English. Then the riders hopped back up on their horses to amble off to the next wee village, and my cousin, CIL, and I took the dogs and headed down the trails into the woods.

It was an delightful Christmas Eve.

Last spring I posted how I had been an absolutely delightful houseguest to my cousin and her husband: getting sick halfway through the visit, commandeering a bathroom and the sofa, and thereby forcing my cousin to wait on me for the remainder of my stay.

Well, the streak continued: my first morning here Viv & I took the dog for a walk through the woods around Charles Darwin’s house (as you do), and I went over on my ankle. It felt okay, so we kept walking and then headed into town to finish up some last minute shopping.

By evening my ankle had swelled up and was throbbing, and I had had to strap it with a tensor bandage (not a term they knew) and sit with it up on a cushion while everyone else made meals, and handed me things, and gave me wine & Ibuprofen (I know, I know, don’t say it). All I could think was: I’m here for several more days, this is a very active family, they have other things going on in their lives at the moment, and how could I be imposing on them like this yet again.

I hobbled off to bed, feeling horribly guilty. But it seems that, all common sense to the contrary, a cocktail of sparkling wine and anti-inflammatories actually works (kids, don’t try this at home). So, while I am still walking carefully when out on the hiking trails, it turns out I am not the burden on my cousins’ hospitality that I had feared (don’t speak too soon, Lainey, the visit is just beginning).

Before all hell broke loose with my cousin’s life, I had booked my car trip from her Dad’s after the funeral down to her house in Kent for Christmas. As it would be on the shortest day of the year, and I DO NOT drive in the dark in the UK if at all possible, I decided to break my journey about halfway. After much planning, phoning, and mapping, I booked us (Scout & me) in at the White Lion pub & inn in Hampton In Arden, a wee village near Birmingham.

Well, it seemed I had landed us in my first truly posh, absolutely rah-rah, tree-lined, mansion-filled, quintessential English Village. There is a large church and the church grounds are full of graves (not quite the same as a cemetery – a cemetery seems to me to be something cordoned off to one side of the church, and there was one of those too, but there were others up against the paths, or under trees in the front ‘garden’ of the church). These graves were all around the grounds and I saw one from 2021, right next to one dated 16-something – wow. Every other car parked along the street was a mud-splashed Land Rover, and all the houses were red-bricked and lit up with tasteful Christmas decorations.

The pub wasn’t quite as old as the village – the village was named in the Domesday Book in 1086, whereas the pub/inn is a mere youngster, barely 400 years old.

The stairs to the rooms had tiny little treads but risers at least 6″ high, the floors were uneven, the window panes were bubbled, and every ceiling was slanted. It was perfect! Granted, the management doesn’t stay on the premises after the pub closes, and the doors are all alarmed after midnight, which had me lying awake at 2 a.m. thinking, “I know ghosts aren’t real, but if they were, would they come in this room?” Really.

The pub itself was also very ‘country-English’. Delicious pub food, lots of beers on tap, and a clientele that seemed to dress entirely in Barbour jackets, wellies, tweed caps, and cordorouy trousers. Everyone knew everyone else, and dogs roamed about, off-leash.

I was at a tiny table with a small bench and a couple of stools. I had a book, and my wine and was just enjoying a quiet evening observing the locals. But the pub was busy, and my table’s stools were empty, so over the course of the evening two different couples sat down and joined me for a drink. One was working class and one was middle class. I am not saying that out of any sense of judgement: each couple told me where they stood on the social ladder. (!) The working class couple regaled me with stories of the past year: the deaths in the family, the nutty relatives, and it’s safe to say the husband hadn’t met a sentence he couldn’t interrupt. They were so nice and so friendly.

The middle class couple were also very pleasant to visit with – they loved Scout and we talked dogs, and travel, and COVID – it was a great half hour’s chat, before they headed off to walk home. I continue to be amazed at how friendly Brits are – I’m not sure where their reputation for coldness came from. Certainly not Hampton In Arden.

Well. The next few posts aren’t going to be in any chronological order – a lot has happened in the last seven days and this is a blog, not a court record. And a couple of them may seem a tad callous, laughing at my cousins’ misfortunes. But, like the Canadian Reids, my cousin and her family all have a strong sense of the ridiculous.
Let’s start with some background and a little timeline. My wonderful Uncle Ian died earlier this month. Until the last two weeks of his life, he lived in the house that he and Aunt Margaret built in the early 70’s. It’s a lovely, sturdy little bungalow in a neighbourhood in the Clyde Valley countryside. Much of the décor has not been touched in decades. My cousin intends to keep the house, fix it up, and use it as their Scottish retreat. I will be helping with some of that (more on that in the future). So, here’s what’s happened since we lost Uncle Ian:
> Viv planned his funeral in Scotland for last Monday, with a reception at his house after the service. Her family would be staying at Ian’s or at her hubby’s mother’s house about 40 minutes away. (I was staying with a kind neighbour.)
> Last Friday, four days prior to the funeral, her daughter & SIL arrived at the house and tried to get in the backdoor, only to find pipes had burst and the kitchen ceiling had fallen in.
> Family moves into overdrive and finds a plumber, a B&B large enough for the family, and a restaurant that will let them have the reception after the funeral on Monday. They head north to Scotland, some by car, some by plane.
> They are a family of eight, and would need transportation around the area, so were planning on using Viv’s MIL’s car, plus those they had already driven up from England. But, they’ve been given notice that that car has broken down.
> Viv finds out her confused Dad forgot to renew his home insurance.
> Funeral was lovely, reception very nice.
> Family arrives at house the next day to rip up some of the wet carpeting, only to find out the living room ceiling has collapsed too from the weight of the water.
> I leave for Kent, because I’ve paid for a B&B in the Midlands and would just be underfoot anyway.
> While they’re clearing the disaster in the living room, the hall ceiling comes down too.
> They do what they can, then half the family heads home, and the other half heads to the elderly MIL’s house to wish her a Merry Christmas and let her visit with the grandkids.
> They arrive to find out she is seriously ill and needs to be hospitalized.
> They call an ambulance. Ambulance drivers are currently on strike, but one eventually arrives.
> They see MIL settled in the hospital, and get in the car to make the eight-hour drive home, where I’m sitting sipping wine, reading a book, and awaiting them. (To be clear, MIL wasn’t left alone; my CIL isn’t a monster – his brother is staying with their mother.)

That was the last five days of my cousin’s life – she and her family are taking it all in stride, some tears, lots of laughter, and a sense of ‘stuff happens, heigh-ho’.
For the last month or so, every time something happened my cousin would say, “well, at least things can’t get much worse” – I keep telling her to stop saying that, she’s tempting the gods, and clearly they don’t like that, as they keep proving her wrong.

Last year, the only snow I remember happened on three or four separate days over the course of the winter. Mostly it wasn’t real snow, just sleet that had flown horizontally across the gardens, landed as less than 1cm on the ground, and was gone within a day or two. Being a good Canadian I had bought an ice scraper by the first of November, but never once used it.

This week has seen the most snow that Orkney has had in a few years. People are (mostly) driving slower, the gritter (sander) has been around to sand the roads, and for some reason, the biggest impact I’ve seen is that Orcadians seem to lose all sense of parking when the snow sticks – I didn’t have my camera with me but two separate parking lots looked like people (who have been using these lots for years ) just pulled in, and decided to step out of their cars and leave them higgledy-piggledy strewn about the lot.

It took about 15 minutes to scrape the car yesterday afternoon. Real sense of déjà vu. But at least we’re not experiencing the outages and layers of snow that Shetland is. I drive south tomorrow – here’s hoping the roads are clear.

In the UK, the pound sterling is the universal unit of money. But that doesn’t mean that all British money is alike. The Bank of England prints money that is accepted everywhere in the United Kingdom (just like Bank of Canada) and it is the only English bank that prints money. But, in Northern Ireland and Scotland (but not Wales – of course not, why be consistent with your inconsistencies?), the major regional banks can print their own money. So in Scotland, the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Clydesdale Bank all print their own money, and that’s what I see and use 95% of the time. Occasionally an ATM (or Cashpoint as they’re known here) will give me a Bank of England note, but that is rare. Every shop and business in Scotland will accept all Scottish notes, and all Bank of England notes. But, not all English businesses will accept Scottish money. My young cousins in the south of England have to visit a bank branch to exchange their birthday money from their grandma in Scotland. In Canada, if you take Bank of England notes into a bank branch, you will have little trouble exchanging it for Canadian. But not so Scottish bills – those have to be sent away ‘on collection’.

Here are a couple of £20 notes. The woman on the Scottish bill is Kate Cranston, a prominent Glaswegian business woman in Victorian times, and I’m assuming you recognise the other lady.

No reason for sharing this – just a useless piece of trivia I thought you might enjoy.

I’m heading south this week to spend Christmas with my cousin’s family in the south of England. Because I flat out refuse to drive in the dark in the UK, this means more than one night in a hotel, as it’s over 15 hours door-to-door without rest stops (it’s the same distance as the crow flies as Kitchener to Quebec City, which would take about 8 hours to drive non-stop – gotta love straight lines).

Scout & I are travelling alone, no car companions, no one to meet up with along the way, so I want to make the most of this trip. So I started planning. I was working with a number of different criteria: I wanted to dine at a Michelin-praised restaurant (Michelin will also give commendations to restaurants the didn’t quite make their 1,2,3-star cut which is good enough for me); the restaurant had to be within walking distance of my hotel so I could have wine with dinner; the hotel had to accept dogs; neither could be in a major city with complex traffic; and they had to be located roughly halfway between Carluke & Kent on the way south, and Kent & Aberdeen on the return trip, with no driving-after-dark involved.

Below is the set up to get this trip booked. I had Google Maps open on one screen, a wonderful website called Leading Restaurants on another, Expedia.com on another, along with Outlook Calendar, Northlink Ferries, and the WeatherNetwork. It took a few hours and several phone calls, but I think we’re good to go.

I betcha Jacques Cartier didn’t put this much effort into going up the St. Lawrence.

Last May I mentioned that when LL and I stayed at the Airport Marriott Hotel in Inverness, there were security guards on each floor. We found out that they were there because a reality TV show was being filmed locally and it was the guards’ job to make sure the contestants had no contact with one another. I remember I also saw a row of black Hummer-like SUVs along the highway near there that same week, but I didn’t connect them with the Prisoners of Marriott at the time.

I rarely watch reality shows. The ones I do watch are things like The Great British /Canadian /New Zealand Bake Off, The Great British Sewing Bee, The Great British Menu (you get the drift). I prefer not to even think about the ones where roses are handed around to hunky men, or people have bees poured on them, or are required to eat unspeakable things. Don’t get me wrong, there is no sense of superiority about my avoiding reality shows: my TV watching roster is hardly highbrow and we all have our guilty pleasures. It’s just that those backstabbing, survivalist, look-at-me shows are just not to my taste.

Last week I saw a promo for a show set in the Highlands, hosted by a British presenter whom I really like, Claudia Winkleman. Like me, she’s not good with the survivalist show genre, but she was intrigued enough by this one to become the host. It was as she was describing it I made the connection: the castle that all the events take place is about a half-hour from the Marriott – it must have been the contestants from this new show in the rooms down the hall, and being transported back and forth in the blacked-out SUVs.

So, I’ve started watching The Traitor. And OMG, I’m hooked (seriously cannot believe I’m saying this). I can see why these shows become water-cooler fodder – I keep wishing I knew someone who was also watching it so we could discuss it. The competitions are all palatable things like a treasure hunt, or a canoe race on a loch, which don’t gross me out; and then the plotting and scheming and nutty reasoning afterwards is hilarious. And, the castle, Ardross Castle, is stunningly beautiful – I drive within five miles of it every time I head south and back.

Winter nights are long in Orkney, and this house is cold. I need something to do in the evenings, and it seems reality TV is a new option (or at least this one show is – I still refuse to watch the gross food competitions). But maybe I’d better go buy a jigsaw puzzle as well – this can’t consume my life.