Back at home after the family Christmas.  What bliss!  It was predictably chaotic, but my parents loved every minute of it (which is the most important thing), we survived (almost as important) – and my brother lived to see another Christmas (which is a miracle).

The plan was that I would cook Christmas lunch for us, my parents and my brother, leaving my mother free to do the final preparations for the Boxing Day do and my father free to make all the arrangements for the children’s games.   And if someone had been dishing out awards on Christmas Day, then I would have walked away with the top award for the most Naively Optimistic Person in the World, whilst my mother would have swept the board in the Competition for the Most Disorganised Woman in the Universe.  Far from putting the finishing touches to her social-do, she spent Christmas Day still trying to find where she had hidden her grandchildren’s presents and then wrapping them.  

Thank heaven for Gordon Ramsay – or rather his easy, prepare-ahead Fillet Steak with Wild Mushroom Gratin Christmas lunch.  At 10.30 am on Christmas Day I was trying to doing the pre-cooking of this, surrounded by a posse of people making concentration hard.  My mother appeared at regular intervals asking which granddaughter she should give a particular trinket to, my father kept coming in and presenting me with a Murder Mystery Clue to solve as he was laying a trail around the house.  And my brother turned up to say Merry Christmas – at least that’s what we think he mumbled. It could just as easily have been 'make mine a pint'.

He had spent all of Christmas Eve and the first quarter of Christmas Day out drinking.  His appearance at 10.30 am was merely a token Christmas present to his liver, as he promptly announced that we was intending to go to the pub for a quick drink before lunch.  And his Christmas present to me, whilst I was trying to make a wild mushroom gratin, was to re-enact all the various dramas that had played out in the village pub the night before.

Which leaves me with rather high hopes of one day being the sister of a famous actor.  Because provided my brother is presented with a never-ending sequence of roles calling for someone impersonating a drunk person, then fame and fortune is surely inevitable.  I am convinced that there isn’t an actor in the world who could give a better performance as a woman called Ann climbing onto a pub table and doing a dance with an imaginary pole before collapsing into a coat stand as my brother did on Christmas day with the benefit of several pints still coursing through his blood system.   Except perhaps Ann herself, whoever she is - if she has come round yet.