The world from my window

Well, Delia's ham is in the oven ready for glazing, Mr Grigg's making sweets and James Bond is on the telly. Across the road, the church candles will soon need lighting for Midnight Mass as the village pub fills up on Christmas Eve. We've had the church carol service - a great success - the fish and chip van had a bumper evening last night and the tills have been ringing at the community shop all day. Personally, it's been an amazing year, with unexpected travels and new opportunities turning up left, right and centre. I'm not quite sure how this blog - or my life - will rattle along in 2015 but I will be sure to keep you posted. In the meantime, a merry Christmas to you and yours and a happy, healthy and peaceful new year. Remember, if you wanna do it, do it. If you don't, don't. I was asked to write something to read out at the carol service on Sunday. So I turned to my journal from two years ago when I was home alone in Corfu with Mr Grigg. ...

After a hairy few minutes wrestling with the world's smallest turkey, the creature has been stuffed, trussed up and put in the oven. If there is such a thing as the runt of the flock, then we've got it. It was the turkey at the back, the one that came last when the birds scurried across the village road to avoid a passing scooter rider with a grown-out Mohican haircut. It was the cougher, the wheezer, pigeon rather than barrel chested and if it could speak it would have had a high-pitched voice like the comedian Joe Pasquale. Still, with Delia's chestnut and apple stuffing and an assortment of vegetables around it, Lefteris the turkey might just make the grade. It cost an arm and a leg, so it had better be good. No wonder villagers call Spiros the turkey man the Roman Abramovich of Kerkyra. We are having our Christmas meal this evening, a break with tradition but we wanted to get on up to the village square tomorrow where, for our favourite taverna and kafenion, it...

It seemed like a good idea at the time. As Mrs Bubbles Champagne-Charlie sank her teeth into a rum baba at an Edinburgh restaurant, she made the most dreadful face. 'This,' she said, in between grimacing, looking like Delia Smith with constipation, 'is not what a rum baba should taste like.' So as we toured around the Scottish capital in an open-topped bus with the Putters, the Champagne-Charlies and Mrs Bancroft, the Enchanted Village Rum Baba Contest was duly launched. And here we are now, at Mrs Bancroft's, with a raft of rum babas to test. I haven't entered the competition because my competitiveness is such that I won't enter anything I don't stand a chance of winning. So I've done pears in cider instead. At our blind tasting, the fragrant Mrs Putter's rum babas stand head and shoulders above the rest, as far as looks go. We have a nibble on Pelly Sheepwash's entry and then try the ones made by Bubbles. And then Mr Grigg...

I proudly show off the new hat Mr Grigg bought me for dog walking. It's pink tweed and lined with grey fake-fur and, more importantly, has the most wonderful ear flaps to keep my lugholes warm. 'That's nothing,' Mr Champage-Charlie says, running to the cupboard under the stairs. 'Oh, Charles,' his wife, Bubble, says. 'Please don't.' She leans forward, in that conspiratorial Delia-Smith-meets-clear-skinned-pixie way of hers, and explains what Champagne-Charlie is about to model for us. It came from a place in Poland with a name I can't pronounce. 'Wear the fox hat,' Mr Grigg says, as Mr Champage-Charlie comes in with the most hideous fur bonce cover you have ever seen. 'I am ,' he says, under a bright red and bushy creation, his nose poking out like a Reynard snout. 'Do you like it?' just as Bubble says: 'I told you where it's from ,   it's a town in Poland .' It could only happen here. That...