tight

If I don’t get up right now to mix some flour with some sugar and fruit and butter and cherries and spices and nuts and wet stuff and then line a tin and heat an oven and add one to another and pop in the third, if I don’t get up to do that then Christmas won’t come and I won’t have to admit how little of the stuff to be done this year I have done or have started to do.

Perhaps I could do all of that and still be a Christmas denier. So long as I don’t turn the thing over, peel away the greaseproof paper, prick it all over and pour over the Marsala. So long as I don’t do that last bit and repeat it over and again, I — and the year — might be saved.

But where’s the fun in that.