Winter, season of mulled wine.

It’s winter. Generally I’m not in favour of it as a season due to the SAD mentioned last week but there are compensations and mulled wine is a major one. We did the first batch today and, sad to relate, it was only a qualified success. We had bought cheap plonk in a box but had neglected to read the fine print – made from grape juice concentrate, 8% alcohol. Hmmm. Not really enough to get you zinging, especially when you consider (as I tell people all the time) that most of the alcohol boils off in the mulling…

But sitting reading the paper and catching up with the blogs I haven’t read over the weekend because we’ve been busy erasing all trace of the builders from house and garden has been pleasant. The house is now springcleaned, shined, beeswaxed and vacuumed to within an inch of its life. You know how, in a certain kind of book, well-looked after houses always smell of beeswax? Well ours does now after the dresser has had its annual going over. The rest of the year it has to survive on the odd cursory wipe and whatever dust is disturbed when we remove things we want to use. From this you can deduce that it’s not a decorative dresser, it’s a functional one and jolly fine it is too. I’m not going to include a picture here because it’ll look like I’m trying to sell it on ebay but suffice it to say that it is about ten feet long and crammed with all of the stuff which there isn’t room for in the kitchen due to my obsessive insistence that we have a table and armchairs in there, thus limiting the number of cupboards we can have.

It’s worth it. working less than ten feet from kettle and tea is a luxury beyond imagining. And it’s not just me who appreciates a comfy chair in the kitchen. Our old ginger cat, Fingal, loves the chair next to the radiator and will sit and stare up at me accusingly if, by mistake, I’ve sat on that one instead of my more ususal one on the other side of the table. She’s on it now, lying all neatly curled up, only opening an eye, if one of us goes past, to make sure we haven’t come to turf her off.

She doesn’t like the winters either, too cold for her old bones, but radiators, like mulled wine, are a definite compensation.