Easter Eggs: a once lovely traditional time of year for celebrating renewal and growth, now small children are given appalling quality chocolate, confusingly hollow and usually empty. I suppose that is a traditional way of giving your kids a metaphor for life (or reality TV).
Weddings: traditional way of enslaving women and their property, of providing for state interference in individual's sex lives and in in most, but not all countries, a form of sexual identity apartheid. Don't go bleating to me about Civil Partnerships, it's one sort of marriage for gay people and another for straights. Netherlands, admirably (feel obliged to mention a positive Dutch tradition) have three forms of union to which anyone of any sexual identity can sign themselves to. But they are basically not my cup of tea. If you want to invite me to one, unless you are a nephew or niece of mine, please don't, though I will of course respect your right to get married. And if you are a n or an n of mine, please be warned I may well just make you a cake and bung you a tenner, with the usual injunction not to spend it all on sweets. Then tell you I am leaving you all my money in my will and not to tell the others.
Right wing governments traditionally come up with convincing sounding narratives for doing really rotten things to poor people, vulnerable people and anyone who doesn't have loads of unearned income, in ways which make many otherwise reasonable people and even some of their victims think "you know, he does have a point".
Left wing governments traditionally eventually implode under pressure from international capitalism and internal torment, get kicked out and then traditionally annoy their loyal supporters in a range of ways, this time by referring to squeezed middles. I have a squeezed middle. I am also a loyal supporter. Squeezing my middle won't rid me of the unwanted extra 8kilo. But I can identify it. Ed, dear Ed, I voted for you, stop all this talk of middles and squeezing and blank pages and get on hammering the coalition's treatment of poor people, women, people with disabilities and also with working out how to implement the Living Wage like you promised you would.
Austerity governments can traditionally rely on a Royal Wedding as cover for even more nastiness, whilst we revert to forelock tugging commoners, grateful for a souvenir mug and a day off job seeking, failing to notice that even when the Queen says she will pay half, that's OUR MONEY she is spending. And we will also be paying for some in the police to indulge in the now traditional habit of kettling under age enthusiasts on the day. Oh, and traditionally, we will all forget that royal marriages, going back to Henry 8th and before, with a very few exceptions, don't traditionally go that well.
Christmas: bah humbug. Once a way of feasting and warming each other up during the dark cold winter days (good plan now the price of gas seems to have double), now it seems to me to have become a way of using tradition as an excuse for making people feel they have to spend three months' wages on STUFF. People, stop it, we don't have any money and spending money we don't have just because bankers want us to is why we are in this mess! Go home and knit some socks. Or order a goat from Oxfam- my kind mother has given me practically a flock over the years and I love them all (thankfully, Oxfam has sent them to live with someone who actually knows about goat husbandry).
So it is with some surprise that I realise that I have a deep and abiding love for one, a Christmas, tradition. Stir up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent is the day to make the plum pudding. I have made it the day to make the Christmas cake, which I adore. Sticky, dark, studded with plump raisins sodden with brandy, it's a nutritious and balanced meal which travels well and lasts for months, particularly if you remember that it has a thirst and will be happier if you give it ever more brandy every few days. There is a lot of time involved in the stirring, cooking slowly and then feeding it over the weeks between the cooking and the big day itself. But that gives you time to watch Mad Men and knit more socks (you can learn how to knit on youtube you know). As you trudge the lonely road on a donkey to the source of your birth, don't forget to ring her up to let her know you have packed a blanket, a fully charged phone and map not a SatNav (who knew that maps would help more in a snowstorm than Sean Connery's voice in an electronic box? No possibility of answering that without sarcasm so I will just park it). And before you set off, wrap the cake up well, remember it will add substantially to your weight allowance if you are flying and if you get snowed up, it will provide you with all essential nutrients for longer than your phone battery will last. Love in the room, Christmas stirred. And you can cook a big daddy of a cake and a little small one, just for you.
Recipe follows on next blog page.....
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