With the unfortunate passing of an aged aunt, I now have to tie the Dickensian knot and add (ghostly) plans for Xmas future to those past and present.

Xmas past is redolent of colonial goose, a dish we put on the festive menu at Moulin Hotel every year in my salad days. Conjured up a couple of hundred years ago in New Zealand, a country with 50 sheep per head of population and scarce few geese, it, inevitably, involved using cookery alchemy to make a leg of lamb taste and resemble a goose. It worked startlingly well, but due to the exigencies of space you'll have to trust me on this (though I can say the process involved saltpetre). As a chef, Christmas day always meant work, then home to an empty communal flat for Goblin hamburgers on well fired rolls. A girlfriend, on seeing the remnants of just such a solitary Yule feast, burst into floods of tears and pledged to be all things to me for the foreseeable future...result then! On occasion we had a chefs Xmas night dining club for those of us stranded in Edinburgh. Each provided a course, I recall providing such baroque nonsense as morel mushroom stuffed scallop, barded with caul and topped with soft boiled quail egg and celery salt! Thankfully this pretentious twaddle quickly descended into mayhem where the words speed, police and dope were never far away.

The stolid (and mercifully uneventful) present requires/required heroic gluttony; M&S prawn ring, smoked salmon roulade, avocado and prawns Marie Rose, melon and Parma ham, oh, and barley broth. To follow (to follow??!!); roast turkey, boiled ham, 4 vegs, roast pots, stuffing, chipolatas, crispy bacon, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, parsley sauce, gravy, pickled walnuts, red cabbage, beetroot and (phew!) to finish; Xmas pudding, trifle, Pavlova, gateau, fruit salad and a cheeseboard. I swear a lady of my, ahem, immediate acquaintance manages to sample all of the above IN ONE SITTING.

And now, with the sad demise of said relative, I find myself unencumbered, so what’s it to be on the forthcoming 25th December? All day running buffet at Lefty O'Dooles in San Francisco? Tuna belly, salmon roe, piparra sauce & green apple air bread at Tickets in Barcelona? Or did I just hear myself promise, just now, on the phone, to take over Xmas catering duties for the entire extended family this year? I'll let you guess...