Opening the Page on 'The Christmas Chronicles'

Dear Nigel,

Christmas may be the highlight, placed centre stage, but this Season of Slumber is like a comfort blanket that you snuggle into and bed down in until the change of light. It starts with the first 'icy prickle across your face', as if a frosted bejewelled spider has traced a distant memory across your cheek.

You can sense a coming home with the trickle of falling leaves; and in the damp and pungent scent that rises as you sink your Wellington boots into the piles of leafy softness. Pretty fungi, frilling over themselves to decorate a rotting bough, trees eager to outdo each other in their display of fanfare colour, like peacocks in their vanity.

And home to Home, and warmth, and fire, and cocoa, and thick socks and blankets tossed on sofas. We line our underground caves like little moles, put by provisions for a hard and long hibernation - even if there is a supermarket at the end of the road. Such urges come from the past, from the part of our genes that we share with other creatures of the earth, more primitive than primitive man, more unknown than the memories and habits we realise.

And in this vein, Sophie and I are out in Biggin dale (one of the lesser known, and certainly less frequented dales around here). We are picking sloes from the old bushes in the depths of the valley, tucked away behind other trees, fruiting in their dimness, gathering the richness of the soil at this point and converting it into bluish purple berries. We pick solidly, peacefully for a good couple of hours. Not a soul is to be heard. The valley has sunk into a late afternoon peacefulness, and the therapeutic pulling and dropping into plastic boxes is the only sound, broken by the occasional random thought or comment. It is good to be immersed in this shared venture.

At home, I freeze the sloes to simulate a frost, so that they will bleed. I lean over to see what you are up to and find that you are making your favourite winter drink, damson gin, so that, like us, it will be ready to drink by Christmas. For you, it is a pile of damsons in a basket at the greengrocer's. For us, the Christmas baubles of blue and purple dotted at random over a tree.

I take the sloes out, cover them in sugar and gin in large glass jars, and daily I give them a shake and watch them bleed. There is plenty here - more than we will need (I hope!) and I will squirrel some away when they are bottled for next year, when they will taste even better.

Last night I finished the last drop of a damson gin that my brother had made for me. He died ten years ago, this year. And each year since I have taken a tiny etched green glass and toasted him, outside, late at night, with a milky moon and stars untainted by any streetlights.

And Winter is like that: A time to toast the treasures of our past, to remember, to assimilate the feelings that another year has laid over the old. We are like trees; each year we make another ring around ourselves. We are not the same as we were the year before. We move forward, continuously, and so this season of retraction is a very necessary one. Without it we would run aimlessly in all directions, following sunbeams and the edges of rainbows.

Feeling better after having made the sloe gin, I find that I want to start making something for the freezer, to put away. There is always that first long intake of breath before I am able to start. And though I love the season I can't quite put my finger on why this unease is there. And then last night it came to me; it is a feeling of shapelessness about this year's Christmas, which unnerves me. Like someone has handed you a present tied with string and you can't find the end to untie. Once I have started it is paint on a canvas, before that it is simply a formless ghost.

So I start with the recipe which is not a recipe. At least, to me it is a cheat and not a proper recipe at all, and I feel embarrassed to put it down. And yet, for all that, it is the number one requested recipe by all my children (bar the youngest), and has to be made every year without fail. And, though my friends and acquaintances who have dined on a bowl of this, would not find themselves presenting Michelin stars to anyone, all have raved about this particular recipe, whilst I hide almost shame-faced behind my apron.


Smoked Salmon Soup

50g butter
2 large onions
2 tbsp plain flour
300g smoked salmon pieces (I use 'trimmings' as these are so much cheaper and quite adequate in this recipe)
300g garlic and herb Boursin cheese
4 pints of fish stock

Method:
1. Melt the butter in a soup pan.
2. Chop the onions and fry gently until soft but not brown.
3. Add the flour and stir until it bubbles.
4. Add the stock a little at a time and stir continuously.
5. Bring to the boil. Take off the heat and stir in the soft cheese and smoked salmon.
6. Cook gently for 5 minutes and then blend until smooth.

In our house it is usually Boxing Day soup. But this year I have also whittled a small box away for a small quiet lunch for two on a perfectly quiet midwinter day.

I have been cooking elsewhere too. In a new job - a vegetarian cafe at an old converted flour mill near Bakewell. It is a wonderfully idyllic spot where you can gaze out of large picture windows at fields of sheep with ducks on the river swimming nonchalantly past, and the clanging of a blacksmith across the yard, working with iron as if it were toffee being pulled over a hook.

It is a good place to be, busy and thriving, yet calm and peaceful. We are 'staff heavy' and so, although it is very busy, no one is allowed to get stressed. We are all close as friends, taking up the slack when it is needed by another; and treating staff and customers as equals. My lunch is as important as theirs. Everyone eats the very best in home cooking - and it is just like home cooking. And it is good to share light-hearted banter with customers who have given themselves the time to sit somewhere lovely and eat the colourful lunches and salads that we provide.

Supper today needs to be hearty and simple. More than anything else I crave

warm food, warm drink. I want to try and keep off those creeping winter pounds that hide under baggy jumpers until the Spring, but the season feels against me.

So, looking through your book for a recipe to fill the gap, I find one for 'Leeks, beans and Italian sausage' (page 42). The leeks are steamed and blended to a cream and mixed with the beans. I make this dinner for my friend and I and am mildly concerned for the lack of a potato, frankly. In much the way I once felt about the vegetarian meal missing a bit of meat, I find my conditioning and upbringing looking for the baked potato in this recipe. But I keep faith with you, and we eat, and it is plentiful and filling. The creamed leeks have become 'the

mashed potato' element in my mind. And I have learnt something new today. I am satiated, but not bloated by starch, replete and content. This very simple recipe has made a mark on me. I am changing the way that I choose to eat, so that the conscious slips into the unconscious pattern of things.

My friends Elspeth and Paul over at the 'Dove Valley Centre' near Longnor, put a free event on each year on Apple Day. We take some new friends with us this year to show them what the sharing of the riches is all about.

As you might expect, Apple Day is everything about apples. There is pressing, and peeling, and drinking and

eating. People bring apples for identification, or boxes of them for pressing and bottling. There are apply crafts for children, Creeping Toad the storyteller, and someone has brought a slide show of the barn owls nesting in the eves of his barn on the moors.

The cakes are warm apple cakes, dates and apple crumble slice - some are lovely, some are so so. All are free to eat, and freely donated by volunteers and visitors. It is a celebration of the season. And though, this year, the weather puts paid to the usual storytelling on hay bales outside under a fine crab apple tree, and the splendid walks in the orchard, people have come knowing what to expect, and expecting to have a good time. And so

they do. I make a mental note to take along some kind of slice next year - my children and their friends seem to have made up for any shortfall caused by a hurried lunch and I shepherd them off upstairs to the barn owl slide show before they polish off the whole table. I am pleasantly gratified to find that they are entranced by this simple slide show of barn owls flying in and out of a small hole, and the enthusiasm of the old man showing it. I have visions of sneaking them out mid-showing when their boredom threshold is reached (these children of the Internet age). But they have proved me wrong. Again.

Walks in the dales are routine at the moment. As long as the Autumn

sunshine lasts and I have a scarf around my neck and good boots on there is a reason to be out there; to be away from the stifling indoors. We will see enough of it soon when the light goes.

The River Dove flows on through many different dales, and different walks I do catch it at different points. Today my walk takes me down the sharp sloping paths of Gypsy bank from the village of Alstonefield to a tiny bridge across the Dove. There is a resident heron here, fishing in the weirs. It is a prize spot this, known for its fine trout fishing. One bank seems almost permanently privately owned, the other footpathed. Fishermen and herons are frequently seen involved in the same sport. There are 177 weirs on

this stretch of the Dove alone. Most of them built in 1920s and 1930s for keen anglers to stock bigger trout.

The heron is breezy about my presence, much too intent on his sport. I am a minor annoyance to him. If he thinks I am getting too close he simply hops down to the next weir. And this way we follow each other down this stretch of the river.

Further upstream (another day, another walk) I glimpse a little of the Fishing Temple between the shedding trees. Here, where Beresford Hall once stood high above Beresford Dale, where

Charles Cotton once lived, there is a tiny garden building tucked away in the trees down by the river, where he used to entertain his friend Izaak Walton, who wrote probably the most famous fishing book ever written: 'The Compleat Angler', in 1653. There is a trout on the weather vein. And the new owner - a keen fisherman it is believed - has plans to restore it to its former glory. History is everywhere you place your look.

The dale can be creepy here when the light starts to fade. It is damp and mossy. The trees are like the Green Man waving their angry arms at you and charging through the undergrowth. There is a greater assortment of fungi distributed

here than I have noticed elsewhere. And this is surely the right time of year to come and observe. Some, like the spinal pages of a book, others with cloche hats tightly pulled down over their pinned curls, and some almost like ric-rac braiding on a vintage 1970s child's dress (-yes, I feel entitled to call all my childhood dresses, the bulk of them whipped up by my Granny on her ancient black Singer, 'vintage' these days. It makes your childhood into a kind of rich plum jam, preserved and richer than the fruit that made it, somehow).

And so I return home to the best part of the walk which is the homecoming. When there is a certain glow in your cheek and an inner warmth which toasts

you as you slip into over-thick socks that you couldn't wear anywhere else, an over-sized jumper rather than put the heating on (and here I see you prefer to do the same), and spend a few minutes on my knees in reverent prayer with handfuls of kindling, knots of rolled newspaper (something my boss showed me recently and which is a revelation in fire building to me).

Halloween is in the air. My friends are preparing to celebrate Samhain and we are off up to Mum's and a wonderful family party at Chillingham Castle, open to all, which has just the right element of ghosts and dungeons and atmospheric lighting. We are taking pumpkins with us to carve the day before - they never seem to last very long once this is done. I have noticed giant ones in the supermarket lately and they have made me smile. Just to see such gluttony in nature reminds me that we are all capable of over-indulgence, pumpkins included. I will search for other suppers like the creamed leeks that balance fullness without heaviness, I think.

You are busy outside again, sweeping the leaves into net sacks to rot down for leaf mould. I feel a bit guilty that I have done the same today, except my leaves have gone off to the council recycling in the brown bin. I think we are lucky here in that we each have a full-sized dustbin, taken fortnightly, purely for garden waste. It is council-long sightedness, for once, for they see that people living here DO want to keep their environment nice, for themselves, as well as for visitors. In an area dominated by tourism this free work is in the council's best interest. So local people do mow the verges they have no need to mow, scoop up channels of leaves at the side of our pathless lanes, and prune and chop where needed. There is a giving - back, in the mowing of the churchyard, or the tending of flower tubs in the centre. Invisible fingers at work, requiring no additional praise. Mainly, it is the older members of the community, those with time to spare. But I have noticed younger ones taking things on, often to ease the burden from an older relative, and anchoring themselves further in their community. Life is coming full circle for us all, like the year, entering its waning phase.

Love Martha x