10 Things to do on Boxing Day

Here are 10 things to do on Boxing Day, if your ideas are in short supply (possibly after too much Christmas food filling up your body, brain and all).

1. Endlessly scroll through the TV guide; decide everything is either rubbish or you've seen at least seven times previously, but end up watching one of the above anyway.

2. Pick at all the Christmas leftovers, until you feel like you've eaten a second roast. (Turkey sandwich with literally all the trimmings anyone?)

3. Drag yourself out of the house before late afternoon to go on a festive walk. Or trudge through some mud down some lane somewhere.

4. Stare at your presents for an alarmingly long period of time, contemplating how you will have to wait another year to enjoy what you had yesterday all over again.

5. After staring at said presents (above), contemplate writing thank-you cards, only to become distracted by said-presents and thus putting them off until late April.

6. Visit relatives and prolong your Christmas high, with a high chance of another three course meal, another load of gifts and another series of desperate jokes from crackers.

'Are these for me?'

7. Clean a space, such a bedroom, with where to place your new gifts. Either succeed in clearing a square section of floor with which to pile up said presents for the next month, or get distracted and realise it's the end of the day already.

8. Be thrifty and bake something with the leftovers of Christmas dinner: Christmas pudding truffles, turkey and cranberry blinis, or realise that all your picking means there is virtually nothing left.

9. Take advantage of supermarkets opening and buy a whole new buffet, after finding you only bought food for Christmas Day and nothing else. (Come away with party nibbles, with the congregation consisting of mainly yourself.)

10. Come to the end of Boxing Day realising you did even less than the previous. And enjoy it. Because it's still Christmas.

Christmas Treats (if the Nativity occurred in 2016)

With only five days left to go (you can literally count it on one hand now!), here's my rendition of the Nativity story, except if it was set in present day...

Mary limply groped for her phone, her eyes barely averting from Tricks of the Restaurant Trade and learning about her new obsession – the guiltily-glamorous gourmet burger – was actually costing her a whole daily salt intake as a normal woman (at just pushing 5 foot, maybe she wasn’t considered normal, but her inner model could dream) and half of her calorie intake. Her vision travelled back to the slinky dress hung lifelessly in her wardrobe, among the lumpy jumpers and jeans, where the buttons were beginning to pinch under her belly button. Maybe… she should lay off those burgers. How many had she had this month? This week?

Yeah, that dress is not going to fit in time for Christmas.

In fact, she had been feeling as bedraggled as her trusty winter turtleneck - with bobbly forearms, a questionable colour scheme and hole under the armpit – for quite a while. It can’t be the weather; she loves the big ho ho ho (since when did she turn into a nursery teacher?) and snow and Costa hot chocolates she has convinced herself is sustainable and necessary as one of her five-a-day. (Ok, so, beans are a vegetable right, and what is chocolate made from?) Maybe it’s her sudden dizziness in the middle of the night.

Joseph just doesn’t understand.

And, as if on cue, here he was, clacking at the front door. Mary prayed he had bought her a puppy, or at least a piece of carrot cake. These cravings were becoming unquenchable.

                  “Joseph, please say you’ve bought-“

Mary stopped. Who the heck was that at the door?

                  “Mary do not be afraid. I have come to bring you good tidings at this special time – you’re pregnant.”

Mary stopped. She recoiled on the sofa. Her phone fell onto the carpet, causing the cat – who had not woken up for at least twenty hours – to scatter out of the room.

                  “Mary?”

She opened her mouth, resembling her childhood guppy, Morris.

                  “Mary?”

                  “Well, how the bloody hell am I going to fit into my Christmas dress now?”

***

                  “Why didn’t you bring the bloody car?”

Mary was whaling, sobbing like a distressed donkey, braying through her sodden hair and puffed cheeks. Her waters had broken – flowing down her favourite Primark penguin pjs, of all the garments the baby could have chosen – and the car had conveniently stalled and the ambulance was probably being held up by a sodding drunk burning their house down from their connoisseur chicken drumsticks as their Christmas hangover cure (everyone knows it’s a fry-up from the non-descript café twenty meters from your front door).

                  “Mary, you shouldn’t swear, you’re carrying the sun of God’

Mary halted and took an exaggerated intake of breath.

                  “Joseph, are you carrying a baby that was thrust upon your body, forcing you to be deprived of toasted tomatoes which now make you want to vomit at the mere smell of them, and need a wee every few minutes because an eight pound lump you were not planning on having suction-cupped itself to your body and is pressing on your bladder – which is small as it is! – and making you eat so much that the dress you had been looking forward to wearing for eleven months won’t even slip over one bleeding thigh?”

Silence slammed between the couple, until Mary resumed her shrieking again.

***

“Mary, there are some visitors for you.”

The thoroughly-attractive doctor peeked through the curtain and made Mary blush with flirtation, until she remembered her whole face was still flushed from the birth. A little boy, wrapped in swathes of hospital blankets, gurgled sleepily in her arms.

Suddenly, as if in a comedy sketch – like this wasn’t one already – three heads in succession protruded around the blue curtain, one on top of the other: faces covered in beards of wild descriptions, some hairs lacquered back, a glint of bewilderment in their eyes. Who the bleeding heck were these?

                  “It’s the boy! The son!”

The one at the top of the people-mountain gasped, sliding his head down the curtain to enter the humble abode of a cornered-off hospital bed, as if he had been standing on the shoulders of the two other men. He darted for the baby, then stopped, and finally noticed Mary.

                  “And who are you? Don’t tell me, the blinking kings or something?”

A pause.

                  “But how did you guess, madam?”

This must be a dream now. I’m in a food coma or I’ve died or something.

                  “My name is Kaleb the Noble, this is Alfonso the Third and that is Kevin”

Mary peeked passed the rotund ‘King’, desperately trying to scratch off a stain on his exaggerated robe. That would be Kevin.

                  “So, I suppose you’re here to see this little bump I’ve just pushed out?”

***

Soon, the ‘few’ visitors had literally turned into a flock, with Kaleb, Alfonso and simple Kevin hurling gifts onto the duvet-cloth, modestly wrinkled around Mary’s bottom half; farmers, who at first she thought were tramps, until they announced themselves as shepherds - at least, that’s what she thought they said, through a tidal-wave of half-undigested crumbs from crisps that had been ransacked from the vending machines - and their bleating livestock; as well as the angel who brought her the joyous news in the first place (also known as Gabe, on friendly terms). Joseph was sent to buy some Waitrose éclairs or flapjack nibbles or something sugary to keep this harem content.

And all they wanted to do was coo over the little baby Mary didn’t even know she was having until a month ago. She was surprised the handsome doctor hadn’t come back to tell her that it was policy to have no more than two visitors at a time – let alone cows in the car park – but Mary suspected he was probably refraining because he found her so, unbelievably attractive, and simply felt too embarrassed to approach her again.

Yes, definitely that reason.

***

Joseph did eventually come back, dishevelled that he couldn’t purchase Celebrations, due to the shelves of every shop turning bare from the scurry of last-minute shoppers.

                  “How’s the li’le guy doing, honey?”

He could act tired all he wanted; it wasn’t him who had to squeeze a watermelon out of his body a few hours ago.

                  “What be his name, foretell?” (Simple Kevin was not simple at all, and actually a wordsmith from all the way over the seas.)

Mary sighed. She gazed upon Gabe, not taking his eyes off the child, while rooting his hand into a selection tray of Cadbury chocolate fingers.

                  “Well, I guess it’s got to be Jesus, hasn’t it?”

The Roof Terrace

A short story, written for my Creative Writing coursework for AS, inspired by Angela Carter's 'A Bloody Chamber'...

His hair was so close to my rouged lips now, I could taste the intoxicating salt, carried by blasts from the waves below us on the roof terrace. A generous amount of moments consumed of brooding on what my next motive was, and what was his; while he had spent his reading the subtleties of when to engage.

Earlier, he told me he had been travelling: a ‘gap year experience’. The evening brought about many of his type and their canny smirks, knowing so much of nothing. Yet, he was different. Foremost, he had not taken to bleaching his roots until the scalp begged with a merciless itch. His shoulders arched downwards, elongating the neck, protruding a head brimming with confidence of knowing a little more than nothing. He was perfect.

Before that, we were sipping florescent cocktails, and I had noted of his absent charm, rather brash, rather bold. An arrogance penetrating the atmosphere: I was so lucky to be honed in on by him. He was a gift. A cherry, already plump with glucose, bobbed in the glasses, oozing into the alcohol-laced concoction. A harmless umbrella crowded the glasses too, connoting Hawaii, though we were not situated near. I wondered how many of these adolescents, pressed up against each other at this ‘evening do’ – this party – enjoyed the feeling of the pungent drinks throbbing in their throats, or if it was merely a show. Admittedly, I didn’t care much for them, but when he swooped in and gallantly offered to purchase one for him, and myself, there was little point in refusing.

As soon as he arrived, along with his band of equally egotistical company, the atmosphere seemed to shift, as the whole party gravitated towards them: rocks orbiting their life source. The weekend parties at these clubs would always draw these types, along with gaggles, pleading seductively for the attention. When he swanned over, it must have been for either the fact no one else was tailed on my arm, doggedly waiting for the whisper of consent; or that he had taken instant pleasure in my outward appearance. Like I had done to him.

So as we perched on the roof terrace only an hour or a little longer after meeting, glasses now drained of liquid, the flaccid cherries now at the bottom of the glasses, it was time. He kept glancing at me, as I appeared hypnotised by the sea, which lapped violently at the cliffs, below the club. Below us. After some time had passed and many unanswered glances had been avoided, his hand crept down, clasping my rear, now formalising his intentions. Timidly, I simpered, which made him assume the authority of the next base to be conquered.

***

When the screams from the terrace had subsided enough, I began to inform the police – who were so kind as to speak all the English they could muster – of the terrible fate of the young man I had been with, who fatally tumbled from the roof terrace to the sea below. All remotely convicting evidence flagellated from a body now slashed by rocks to form pathetic, limb debris. A dreadful accident of ‘too much to drink and too much cockiness’ I whimpered in sorrow. For, who would not believe an innocent girl like me?

Baby Blues, and Reds and Yellows

“Dorothy don’t eat that, it’s not food sweetie!”

I obediently drop the piece I have been gnawing onto the floor. Why, if it’s not food, has it got yellows and reds on it? Those are food colours.

            “That’s a coaster honey.”

What is a ‘coaster’, if not to chew on? Honestly, this world is rather confusing, the ‘dos and don’ts’ of our eating habits. Why can’t mummy just make everything food?

She scoops me up from the floor and wrestles my legs into my special seat, which is higher than mummy and daddy’s at the squarer table.

            “Bon appetite!”

Mummy slides my Pepper Pig bowl onto my tray, smiling, but I’m not: this mush, swimming on top of Mummy Pig’s dress – and drowning George – is certainly not edible. It’s not yellow or red or green or any of the food colours. How can I possibly eat that?

Daddy angles my aeroplane spoon (which only makes noises when he wields it)| in his giant hands and dunks it into my bowl. This is food then.

            “Open up monkey!”

I am not a monkey, daddy. You showed me one at the zoo and I am not that hairy-The spoon is flying closer to my face, I can’t escape the mush! Why won’t let my seat free me?

Daddy zooms the spoon right for my mouth but my lips are sucked in, like the time I found a ‘lemon wedge’ – how that qualifies as food, I will not know (other than being yellow).

            “Nee-oww, c’mon munchkin, let’s eat some banana.”

I open my lips to protest and in it goes, flopping around my mouth. It shouldn’t be food-but it’s sweet and pleasant and doesn’t hurt my nashers. I think I like this ‘nana’.

When George can breathe again, in my bowl, daddy heaves me from my seat and cradles me to my bed-cage.

            “Mummy and I are goes to have our own dinner now, ok honey?”

I thought my name was Dorothy? Now it’s Monkey, Sweetie, Munchkin, Honey – can they just not decide?

From my bed-cage, I can see mummy and daddy at the table, mounds on plates in front of them. Maybe Piglet or Eeyore are on their ones.

As the food disappears into their mouths, their spoons do not become aeroplanes – not even daddy’s. And where is there nana? They have green balls and red sticks and a yellow splodge and a brown brick Surely they cannot eat that?

But, daddy’s is all gone, quicker than Dancing Tigger can bop to his song (very fast). Maybe the colour rule for food is not real: I ate yellow and red and that wasn’t food and mummy and daddy are eating brown bricks that are? How will I ever learn what food is?

After the Big Bang

Then, I was awake.

Once adjusted to the ominous black, I gazed upon pinpricks of white: some far away and others like neighbours. Yes, in the beginning, the galaxy did not feel like a solitary place. Time was washed away by peering into the stars, marvelling. Each rotation displayed a new angle, a new perspective on the inky garden I was anchored to. The blazing petals stood against the heavy atmosphere – was it oppressing? No, it was simply there, just surrounding us in a sea of nothing.

I did not notice change until I began to sweat rivers. They tricked around my spherical form; the atmosphere-of-nothing preventing the torrents from falling below. Water pooled and swelled like a star about to erupt.

And, in response, ulcers began to bulge, hot and sore, filling with the pulsating orange blood. When one did seep, the wax trickled; crusting, creating moles of rocks. Other lingered on, shifting in the oceans, as I broke up.

I was forming: becoming a world.

Soon, ticks niggled at my scalp, now split into woven islands. They developed alongside I, conjoining and recalculating, until they inhabited my whole body. Some would patter along my forehead, while others tangled into trees, or rode upon pinched mountains. Some floated like I in the seas, sinking into embedded pores, unaware of the blistering of my molten blood.

Their eyes consumed the atmosphere – as I did when first conceived – while I blew air in circulations, as they prayed for breath. Some invented night and day, which merely passed me by with each, lumbering pirouette. They could see what I first witnessed, as they stumbled into life and death.

For I was a God, a life source to those who pranced upon my watery skin.

I was Earth.

Written after inspiration from Sharon Olds' poem 'First Hour'

Broccoli Fingers

Every other day, as my lazy fingers strain to reach the TV remote, a reel of depressing - sometimes slightly provocative - news stories steam on, while I slurp on my Shredded Wheat. And, more often than not, someone in some country has done something to offend them. (As we’ve proved with most of history, we don’t learn from the past…) And, more often than not, we all form one of three innate opinions: “they’re really stupid what the heck did they think would happen?”; “they had every right to, free speech human rights” etc, etc; or “Mum where’s the remote? Has it fallen down the sofa cushion again?”

However, I have been thinking (batten down any loose objects!) and surely, surely you would research the customs of a place before you visit? Maybe? I mean, you wouldn’t burst into a holy place of worship, with bikini shorts half way past your rear end, hooting a vuvuzela (and aren’t we all glad they were all buried, along with the hopes of becoming the next top Olympic gymnast). Well I hope not: it would be hideously embarrassing for everyone there, and yourself, as well as completely offensive.

And, trust me, it is embarrassing when you get the rules wrong:

When I was about seven, I was gleefully around my best friend’s house (a maze of animals and theatre tickets I could only aspire to own), chomping on the tea her mum had cooked for us. I wasn’t a particularly fussy child at that point – and, goodness, I had been previously – yet I did have some odd habits. I was, in truth, still grappling the concept of using cutlery and there were some foods I just didn’t use them for: it had just never occurred to me – I wasn’t trying to be a generally disrespectful and downright bratty youngster, I promise.

Anyway, so we were all around my friend’s varnished dining room table – myself, her, her mum and dad, and two older sisters – enjoying a chat as awkward and slightly forced as you can probably imagine. Due to this, I wasn’t exactly examining my eating habits, as I picked up the broccoli. With my fingers. In fact, it only registered when my friend leaned across to her mum and asked – in a louder voice than I appreciated – “mum, can I eat my broccoli with my fingers too?”

Now, I blush like someone has smashed blackberries into the apples of my cheeks, so you can imagine what happened to my face right at that moment. I delicately placed the quarter-eaten broccoli back on the plate, as my friend’s mum agreed she too could munch on the broccoli with her little fingers. Even then, I could understand she was only doing this to protect the little dignity a year three actually possesses. It was mortifying and I have since never eaten broccoli like I feel it was intended ever again.

So, if you ever discover yourself to be in a peculiar land – a foreign country, a religious conference, or your friend’s deceptively-relaxed family home – please try to observe the customs; you don’t want to trudge into the trap of broccoli fingers.

La Gioia e Guai (Joy and Woe)

A poem I wrote for creative writing coursework last year, about the struggle between the emotions 'joy' and 'woe' in someone's brain. It was heavily inspired by John Milton's 'Il Penseroso'

 

Hence my torn, wretched brain

An immortal battle, destined and done

Hath my sanity gone?

Drowning in feeling, after a birth maim

Which sliced my mind in two

Inhabiting a juxtaposing twin

Duelling from within

Sole decisions perplex for hours

Far beyond my powers

One Woe, one Joy, replenishing their coup

Hail Joy, embodied like a Goddess

Shrouded in a golden dress

Euphoric under gleeful beam

For she is one of our dreams

Adopting what may bring me bliss

Appraisal like a well-won kiss

Felicity bestowed for delight

Woe in hostility from this fright

Mere mention of an exuberance

Spirals into sorrowful trance

Persuades a route of melancholy

Endorses what is right and holy

For desolation tails our sin

Which one should purge from within

Homage Misery, the subsequent

Grounding me with an anchor’s dent

Let it be known, to be modest

Clutches at the hands of sadness

For Woe is wrapped in a vortex

Unhappiness – black – she ejects

Shadows monosyllabic choices

Fought by Pleasure’s tongues and voices

Muffled by lamb’s wool, by new-born’s fuzz

Ecstasy flows with electric buzz

“Select what will bring elation

Not whom escorts vile dejection”

Allergic to her sister’s despair

Happiness amends to disrepair

These parasites, whom I play host

Forced to hear the winner’s boast

While the other slinks deviously

Pounce prepared meticulously

On a coming alternative

I unknowingly grant and give

To Exhilaration and Gloom

O my poor head hath no room!

(Woe smirks at relentless anguish)

O to most this seems outlandish

Mind carved into quarrelling divide

Joy and Woe on either side

Pilot to each option I conduct

Pair of twins, with me, are stuck

In the Defence of Blue Cheese

Every summer, our family would pack our car boot – until there was a bulging sensation in the metal – and take the Euro Star across to France. Although an ambling journey (probably far worse for my parents, desperate to keep their young daughter and her baby brother continually amused), the holidays we experienced in St Tropez and Nice were simple wonderful. Among their toasty weather, plethora of activities and explorations, the French are the best at food. One of our favourite ways to endorse in this was to have a ‘market lunch’, consisting of fresh baguettes (far lighter than the limp sponges that have embedded into English supermarkets), pâtés, cheese and fruits which all could have featured on an M&S advert. As I gorged on foreign crisps and strawberries – though not together – my parents would laden their sliced baguette with something so alien, I believed it inedible: blue cheese. How were they not disgusted by the boisterous mould, tinting the whole slab a palette of blues and greens? They produced the audible sounds of pleasure when the bread was clamped into their mouths, but this was an equation I simply could not configure.

Literally the biggest slabs of cheese we've ever witnessed. Our purchase from a French market this year was well worth it

Years later, I was at my Grandma’s house, eagerly bouncing on my chair, waiting for our typically homemade, traditional delights to unfurl into today’s bowl. (You can tell my life has gravitated around my life source of food.) She slid us all a bowl of soup and I graciously sipped the smooth food-liquid hybrid off my spoon.

Half way through, she announced what enchanting flavour it was: broccoli and stilton. Blue cheese. I was ingesting mouldy cheese, and I loved it!

So, why does this savoury mound make us quiver with distaste? For one, the most obvious allows me to use the ‘never judge a book by its cover’ cliché: it’s marbled with mould. However, unlike the fuzz that spins a jacket over your grapes overnight, mould on blue cheese is not harmful to us at all. This breed of mould is non-toxic and – better still – may even be beneficial for our bodies: penicillium roqueforti (guess which cheese this mould may inhabit) has antibacterial properties, which even prevent some harmful pathogens from attacking our body.

Even after 9,000 years of spreading and nibbling upon this cheese (and leaving the table still perfectly healthy from doing so), some neophobes are still unconvinced. In which case, I always like to refer to our disgust of fat: chewy, bulbous strings of white, encasing otherwise pleasant meats. On its own, fat makes people uncomfortable, even a little queasy. However, how do you think the gravy drizzled over your roast dinner tastes so moreish? Or how bacon sizzles and crisps under the grill? Much like fat, mould is only acceptable in the right circumstances, the right contexts.

And, cheese is the best of them all.

If you’re still stubborn on testing a bit of solitary blue cheese, there are an abundance of recipes, which would be simply undesirable without it. The classics include: soups (my first experience with broccoli and stilton, but also with celery, cauliflower, or crumbled over your mundane garden-vegetable for some more flare), as well as sprinkled on salads and stirred into Italian pastas. Steak and stilton. Gorgonzola-glazed chicken. Delicious.

If stilton and roquefort sound too bold for sheltered taste-buds, gorgonzola and Danish blues are creamy enough to glide onto bread, melting in your mouth like it would on a steaming dinner.

Finally, I feel one must just be brave.

So, take yourself to the cheese aisle (or a French market, if you want to experience the literal ‘crème-de-la-crème’) an place in your basket something which will one day be incorporated into your weekly shop.