THE ART OF SAVOIR FAIRE

Mireille Guiliano: The Art of Savoir-Faire

  These days a year seems ridiculously short within which both to make and achieve a resolution.  And if we only begin in January, don't get underway until February, have a break at Easter then plan the summer holidays, autumn will be rushing towards us before we've really got into any sort of stride at all.  Moreover, by then we probably will have forgotten why we resolved what we did and what we intended to do about it.  The resolution will have proved no more than a good intention - a bit like a Government target - rather than a clear plan for action and delivery.

    I was brooding on this very point as a matter of fact on 22nd December.  (I don't know about you but I am given to brooding on dark mornings over my porridge and am often still brooding when I arrive at my desk and open up my trusty laptop:  my own personal alchemical window on the world through which I scry the comings and goings of my friends.  Not only friends either, for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker all clamour for my attention).

My friend Amazon is particularly efficient in this regard.  She writes first thing every morning with an amazing offer. (I call her 'she' because, first, she is big and mighty and, second, because I am not sure that any Amazons were men, which raises the interesting question of how the race was perpetuated; Reader if you happen to know perhaps you could leave a comment.) 

So Amazon wrote on 22nd December beseeching me that 2012 would be a very different sort of a year, and boundlessly more prosperous, if only I clicked on the right hand side of the page and they  deducted £9 and some pennies from my account.  In return (though not before Christmas if I was so parsimonious as to insist on the free 'super-saver' delivery) they would send me a new book, just out, by Mireille Guiliano - the renowned author of 'French Women Don't Get Fat.'

Those that know me know that I have been a fan of this tome ever since it appeared a few years back and have indeed personally accomplished the 'magical leek diet,' surviving a whole forty eight hours on leek broth.  Ever since reading it I have been leaving half bananas about the kitchen and watching (but sometimes only watching) my portion sizes.

Now retired from her position as CEO of the American end of the Champagne House Veuve Cliquot Mireille calls her new book 'Women, Work and the Art of Savoir-Faire,'  and she describes it as...

"........the sort of book I wish I had been given when starting out in the working world and had at hand along the way.......you'll find advice on getting ahead and getting promoted....but more than that, you'll find advice on being happy and living a good life, even while you are making the biggest contribution you can in the workplace.  That's why I dare to talk about style and clothes and food and wine and entertaining and life in a business book."

 How could I resist?  I clicked on Super-Saver Delivery and my friend Amazon must have taken pity for the book slid through my letterbox on Christmas Eve.  I read it almost at once.

There is a mountain of sensible information here:  set yourself achievable objectives; spend less time on trivia and more on planning and preparation; work out what is making you stressed, identify the elements and then attack each one in turn; invest in a good haircut.  The lifestyle and coping strategies are exciting, the pages on entertaining and preparing for business dinner parties at home could become a bible.  My only gripe is that she seems to overdo the chocolate - her first business menu, for instance, comprises Soup with Chocolate, Duck with Chocolate and then, as if that weren't enough, comes this glorious confection: Mousse Au Chocolat with Ginger with the following ingredients (for 4 people). 

12 ounces dark chocolate

8.5 ounces of heavy cream

2 ounces butter

2 egg whites

2 tablespoons sugar

2 ounces ginger confit, thinly minced.

(I worry that it might be a tad fattening, especially with chocolate in the two courses before.  I am trying to calculate how long one would need to live on leek broth to compensate).

Still - a remarkable book and illustrated by a personal anecdote.  As a young woman, just about to embark on a career, Mireille took a travelling holiday before commencing a dream job at the Council for Europe.  In Greece she met an American and fell in love with him (it helped they spoke each others languages).  After a very short time he returned to America while she was due to start at the Council of Europe.  He asked her to join him in New York.  Classic dilemma - job or man?  How many of us would have refused to be diverted, chosen the job, not believed that a holiday romance would work? What would our friends have advised?  But she chose the man and is still married to him, while starting a new career, from scratch in a new City and language, and on a new Continent. 

If she had been following the advice in her book she might have asked herself  'what's the downside?' She could have always come home.   But you have to hand it to her, choices like that are what constitute style and 'savoir-faire.'   I believe Amazon will happily supply you, too, with a copy of her book. Meanwhile my resolution is to re-read it and to celebrate losing a stone by making Mousse Au Chocolat with Ginger.

AN INDOMITABLE LADY

We were at the restaurant

For three years from 1941 Marie* received a visit from the postman on Saturday, but the letters she received were not ordinary letters. They contained news about the Resistance: scribbled reports of actions and details of the occupying German forces.  It was her job to turn these manuscripts into a newsletter and then to take the typewriter from beneath her bed and to type them onto a stencil.  This she put in an envelope and delivered on Sunday evening. 

In all other respects she was a model citizen.  Born in 1920, she worked in a bakery and ever since France had fallen and the seaside town where she had grown up had been invaded, she had seethed with resentment.  She joined La Résistance.

Her work went on, week in week out, for three years.  Then, in the spring of 1944, the Gestapo came knocking.  Her little cell had been betrayed.  She was carted away roughly, her hands bound, and thrown into the interrogation prison. 

She learned her contacts had been arrested too. As she had no information Marie was released after a few days to a French prison where life was austere, but bearable. She wrote a letter home to her parents.  A letter which she still has.

Then came D-Day and the decision to remove all Resistance prisoners to camps in the east.  The Germans put her, and thousands of others, on overcrowded trains that rattled north and east.  No-one knew where they were going.

After an eternity they arrived in Berlin.  The station signs said so.  She could see German civilians on the platforms, waiting for their trains. But no guard came to unlock the doors.  Seeing her behind the bars of her carriage, a youth drew his finger across his throat and smiled.  She was still only 23.

Eventually they arrived in a camp in Czechoslovakia, a camp infinitely worse than her French prison.  A camp into which inmates were supposed to walk but from which they were not supposed to return.  Rations were designed to keep a fit person alive only for nine months.  Being small, Marie survived ten.

She lost her name and became a number: 384450.   Marie had to learn to say her number in German and to understand commands, but she resolved never to accept the German language, never to speak it.

After a few weeks an orderly issued the prisoners with pencils, paper, envelopes. They could write home, he said.  Of course, she fell to with a will, letting her parents know she was alive and would someday return.  She handed the letter to the grey-clad orderly with thanks in her eyes.

A month went by, two months, then Marie and a few other prisoners were called out to stand in the prison yard in the drizzling rain, shivering in their thin prison rags.  Eventually the commandant came out on a balcony. “I have good news for you” he said. “We have received a delivery of mail.” 

The joy she felt could be imagined.  But it was short-lived.   The letter she was given seemed familiar.  It was the one she herself had written two months before, which had never been posted.  The Germans had played a trick. “To undermine our morale, make us give-up,” she said.

Then it was winter, cold and grim in the heart of the Continent.  Marie became emaciated, but somehow she survived the starvation rations. The days lengthened, the grass grew again, leaves appeared on the trees - and then, suddenly, she and her fellow prisoners saw the Germans had left.  No helmets sat behind the guns in the watchtowers.

Hours later a jeep pulled up at the gates.  She heard American voices.  She rushed forward and threw open her arms.  She wanted to speak, to speak in French again, or even to say ‘Hallo’ in English.  But no words came.  Her throat, her mind, seized. As though the Germans wanted to leave her with one last humiliation the only sound she could make was the hated German word ‘Wilkommen.’

She was speaking to me in French and as the memory came flooding back as vivid today as that day 67 years ago, a tear rolled down her ninety-one year old face. “J’étais très vexée,” she said.  I was very cross with myself.

I laid my hand on hers and we resumed our meal in the restaurant by the sea.  She had just consumed a large plate of ‘fruits de mer,’ as vigorously as a woman half her age, and now had embarked on an enormous confection of dessert.

“You may be small,” I said, “but you have an indomitable soul.”

I was a guest at a family party and we sat looking out across the beach and to the sea and the rocks beyond.  I had eaten the best sea bass I had ever tasted and was now eating profiteroles, filled with ice cream, and covered with a lush sauce of dark chocolate.   Marie’s experience in the starvation camp heightened my appreciation of the food.

“I did what I did for love,” she said later. “Love of my country, love of freedom.  I was lucky.  I returned.”  And afterwards she gave me the kisses and the bear hug that only someone who knows that she is lucky can really give.

*I have changed her name.

HOW TO CHANGE A TYRE

Di turned up, aged Mother in tow, on an expedition to Waitrose.  J decided to join them.  I saw them into the car which had, I noticed,  a flat tyre.  Not an auspicious start, I thought.

Now changing tyres is one of the few things I can do.  Ten minutes, I said.  I asked Di to pull the car forward and off the road. Unfortunately, off the road was on a slight slope.

We helped aged Mother, a week short of her ninetieth birthday, into the house.  “Would you prefer a cup of tea or a glass of wine,” I asked her.  “Whatever is easier for you, Pet,” she replies. She is the only person in the world that calls me ‘pet.’ Aged Mother hails from Cullercoats.

I poured the glass of wine and gave her a mince pie, apologising for its ramshackle appearance. I change tyres better - or so I thought.

Outside it began to rain. I put on a coat and loosened the wheel bolts.  One was a locking nut, necessitating a fruitless search for a tool.  Eventually Di called her husband and we discovered that the locking nut thingy lay in a glove box between the seats.  I undid the locking nut and removed it completely.

I then screwed up the jack.  The car rose.  All was going well when there was a crunch and the car subsided the jack now impossibly wedged under the car.  “I’ll get another jack,” I said. 

Now I was sure that in the the garden shed could be found two jacks with a third in our own car.  Rummaging in the shed produced no jacks. 

I looked in the maintenance book for our car.  Find the jack under the boot lid it said.  But when I pulled up the boot carpet, which appeared as though not designed to be pulled up, there was no secret jack compartment.  The rain fell faster.

I reported my failure to Aged Mother who was now on her second glass of wine. “I’m enjoying myself, Pet,” was all she said.

It was time to call the professionals.  This required another call to Di’s husband to dig out the relevant insurance.  I think he was watching some needle match.  Anyway he gave the impression of regretting the disturbance.  Aged Mother commenced a third mince pie.

The garageman rang to say he would be half an hour.  I wondered what that might mean in mince pies. Then he said he wouldn’t fit the spare unless it were correctly inflated.  Health and Safety, didn’t I know?  He rang off.

But what is the correct pressure, we asked? Aged Mother didn’t know, but wouldn’t mind another glass of wine.

Di rang a third time.  Eventually (when no doubt two vital goals and a penalty had been scored) came the news that 30 pounds might be reasonable.  We loaded the greasy tyre into my car and went to see Mr Jay at the petrol station. 

Jay’s air pump demanded 50p. Neither Di nor I had 50p. But Mrs Jay changed a pound in the middle of a helpful conversation about Bombay Mix.  The 50p inserted, the airpump clattered into reluctant life.

Nothing happened. Very little air came out of the pump: I could hold my finger over the valve with no problem.  The scale on the inflator wasn’t budging.  I went in search of Jay.  The pump died.

Jay, dear man that he is, has just has a kidney transplant. “It is the cold weather,” he explained  “you have to hit the inflator very hard against the wall. Then it will work.”  I pointed out that the pump had stopped.  “You need another 50p,” he said.

“It isn’t a fast pump. It is a slow pump.” Di looked incredulously at the beaten-against-the-wall-gauge:  it had now moved from 10 to 12 pounds.  “You see!” said Jay, disappearing.
The gauge crept ever so slowly up.  It was a very slow pump.

Back home we found the garageman fuming on the doorstep and about to go. He had arrived - in a vehicle that looked too small to accommodate his bulk let along his tools - in 20 minutes, not half an hour.  If looks could kill we would have been toast.

“There’s a nut missing,”  he spat out.  Luckily I had put the locking nut where it could be found easily.  “Never jack a vehicle in a hill,” he added, doing just that.  Di has a good line with angry men. “I expect you’re very busy,” she smiled.  “Flat out” he grunted in the first vaguely civil words to pass his lips. “Could do you a cup of tea,” I ventured.  But he had finished. Not in ten minutes but in two.  He raced away to his next job.

Aged Mother professed that she had had a most satisfactory afternoon, but J never got to Waitrose.

SO WHY NOT TURN CHRISTMAS ROUND?

'Tis the season to be jolly, as the old song has it.  Well, no, not really.  'Tis the season to be stressed would be more like it.  Still help is at hand for I hear the BBC has discovered a group of researchers who have carefully plotted the development of pre-Christmas stress and, most importantly, have calculated when it ends.  According to Radio 4, this is when the presents have been unwrapped and the dinner has been eaten: a time which occurs, so the researchers say, in the average household around five minutes to two o'clock on Christmas Day.

There is something in that precision, isn't there, that makes one instantly suspect that the researchers do not inhabit the same world as you or I?  I suppose there may be some super-efficient households in which everything is finished by five minutes to two; where the paper-hatted family falls contentedly into a stress-free sleep wearing their new slippers and smelling strongly of the less expensive offerings of the parfumiers (for I doubt those who finish their Christmas lunch at 1.55pm precisely, are in the habit of lashing out £241.95 for a 30ml bottle of Channel No 5), but I have never known any.

My own pre Christmas stress has been building up quite nicely as it happens and is now safely in the red area of intolerable pressure.   Somehow we have enjoyed five dinner parties in eight days, four of which have been given by ourselves involving considerable moving and rearranging of furniture and equipment.  The dishwasher and the cooker, both of about twenty years vintage, sigh almost audibly as they receive another load. Bless them!

As if this wasn't enough it has been Christmas card week and present ordering week and the week the car went in for its MoT.  It has been a week of thunder and hail and the week when the telephone crashed.  The car failed its test (it needs a new windscreen, the garage said helpfully) while the telephone needed, it turned out, a new junction box, the previous one having melted in the storm; both required me to be early on parade waiting for the requisite engineers to make a house call.   Meanwhile, our label customers have merrily been demanding ever more complicated jobs in ever shorter timescales 'before Christmas' so that we have been winding labels literally between the wineglasses and candlesticks.

With a week still to go I am nicely frazzled, with a sore tummy, and the irritating feeling of guilt you get when you receive a card from someone you have previously overlooked. There is still much to do: the car to be given another go at its MoT, and fourteen boxes to be shipped out in the direction of the sunny Seychelles. 

If the government wanted to do something useful it could employ me to give Christmas a makeover for the purpose of reducing stress levels in the population.  At the moment we all want to fit everything in 'before Christmas.'  That includes present buying, card posting, cake making, party giving, tree decorating, relative visiting and so on.  Everything has to be done at once and the result is the nation drowns in stress.  No wonder a sea of alcohol is required to survive the ordeal.

But then, after Christmas, nothing happens apart from the New Year hiccup.  Time is spare.  If only those empty hours could be moved into the 'before Christmas' slot.

So why not turn Christmas around? Recently, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' have become ever more a reality.  So what if we moved Christmas back to the Feast of the Epiphany - from the first to the twelfth day of Christmas?  Christmas, the religious festival, could of course remain on 25 December, but 'The Big Day' would then be at the end of the holiday rather than at the beginning.  All the Christmas paraphernalia could be done in the holiday period itself thus ensuring that December's productivity and our collective sanity don't suffer as they usually do.

In our drama group it has become a tradition to celebrate Twelfth Night with some sort of festivity and a handsome frangipane Galette des Rois. This year the Rain or Shine Theatre Company are bringing their winter show Top Hats and Tinsel to Cowbridge.

The Twelfth Night tradition is one well worth reviving.  Interestingly I see in this week's Spectator magazine an article by Melanie MacDonagh recounting how women used to gather in the West of Ireland to celebrate the Epiphany with cakes and gossip in a celebration called Nollaig Beag - or Little Christmas.  These days though, she says, the custom is 'an opportunity for well-to-do urban women to meet up and drink in a hotel or a pub........a self-conscious kind of Celtic version of International Women's Day.'

Well - it's an excuse to bring out the Chanel I suppose, and it likes me better (to use a Shakespearean idiom) as a stress-buster than finishing the show by five minutes to two on Christmas Day.

A STORY FOR THEO - WATCH OUT FOR SEAL HOLES

A Seal Hole - with a Mole (I mean a Seal)

Christmas is coming. Our little grandson, Theo, came into the house yesterday and looked down the long hall into the sitting room where the newly decorated Christmas tree twinkled under a thousand and one lights and let out an excited 'Oooooooh'! His face lit up like a Christmas sparkler.

How wonderful to be not yet three and this  the first Christmas you remember.  something you really are seeing for the first time: trees and presents and candles and general festivity! He took the tree baubles in his hands, squeezing each gently.  I think he expected them to be balloons or tiny footballs.  Whatever was this wonder chez les grandfolk?

Still the excitement may have been too much for shortly afterwards he curled up in the big red armchair with his favourite soft toy - a Penguin.  The poor lad has not been terribly well, laid low by a bug, and has been hot and fretful with a hacking cough.  Yesterday he was better but exhausted.

So I sat with him on the arm of the chair and made up a story about Penguin, while he went in search of the land of nod.  As far as I remember it went like this. 

One wild Antarctic day, when the wind howled and the snow blew all around, Penguin was trudging home across the ice after a day’s fishing.  Slish, slosh, slish he went, for parts of the ice were melting.  Penguin hadn’t been very successful with his fishing: he’d fished all day and hadn’t caught a single herring for his tea.  He was sure to be scolded when he returned home. But the fact was that the herring were becoming fewer and fewer and the ones that remained had all grown devilish shy.
 
So his creel was empty, poor Penguin, at least empty of fish.  For with his fishing net (which all clever Penguins carry in their fur) he had caught some shrimpy little things, which can be quite delicious, but which are not the sort of thing to fill up a family on a cold, damp and windy evening.

Anyway, there he was, splish sploshing along through the snow and the ice and looking up at the sky and wondering whether he might have better luck tomorrow when suddenly, CRASH! and Gurgle! and Bbbb-otheration! He found himself up to his armpits (or rather his flipperpits) in seawater.  He had fallen into a seal hole. 

If I had been a rabbit, he thought to himself crossly as he struggled to crawl out of the water, I might have tripped over a molehill.  Moles and seals both travel around under the ground, though out on the ice, there isn’t any ground, if you follow me, and the seals have to make do with water.  But like moles they like to pop up now and again to take a good breath of fresh air.  So seals make holes in the ice into which respectable folk, minding their own business and not looking too closely where they are going, occasionally fall.  Bother! thought the Penguin again as he splashed water from his feathers.

He started again to waddle wearily homewards, looking down in case another seal hole should leap out at him unexpectedly, when he heard a cry behind him.  It was his friend William, who had also been fishing out on the ice. 

When Penguin turned around he saw that William was waving to him.  “Watch out for the seal hole!” Penguin cried.

   “What seal hole?” answered William.  But it was too late. There came a loud splosh and William’s dumpy little body disappeared from view.

    Penguin ran back to the seal hole just as fast as his little legs would carry him. He grabbed hold of William’s flippers and pulled and pulled, but William seemed quite stuck. Then suddenly, ‘pop!’ William shot out of the hole like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

    But what was this?  William was covered in fish!  There were fish in his creel, fish in his clothes, fish in his boots (William always wore thick waterproof boots). No wonder Penguin could hardly pull him out of the hole!  When he fell in he must have landed smack in the middle of a shoal of herring and when Penguin pulled him out the fish must have got trapped around him. Wasn’t that lucky?

    So to thank Penguin for saving him and rescuing him from the seal hole, William said Penguin could have some of the herring.  In fact there were more than enough fish for the two of them so in return Penguin gave William some of the little shrimpy like things, for Penguin always believed in sharing, and the two friends then walked home across the ice to the shelter of the mountain, singing fishing sort of songs and telling stories and meanwhile, KEEPING A GOOD LOOK OUT FOR SEAL HOLES!

(The photograph of the seal by the hole is from dougs-antartic-adventure.blogspot.com  via Google's Images for Seal Holes.  Use is acknowledged with thanks).

YES, BUT WHY REINDEER?

My good friend Frances, who hails from New York and often comments on this blog, regularly posts beautifully illustrated accounts of the great parades that march through that city.  These mark this national day, or that liberation or so and so's hard won rights.

In our little town this side of the Pond our parading is more limited. We don't have a Mardi Gras or a Carnival.  Britain lacks an independence day or a liberation day (never having been either dependent or liberated) and we probably think we have enough civil rights to be going along with.  Neither are we terribly diverse either ethnically or sexually or any other 'lly,' and in any case we are a pretty tolerant bunch; at least we like to think we are.

While our parading may thus be limited it isn't non-existent.  Each year at the end of November we hold the Reindeer Parade when Father Christmas, regaled in splendour in a four-wheeled sled, is pulled through the town by reindeer, showering, over all the children en route, largesse to be delivered on Christmas Eve via parental intervention, or so one hopes.  The scarlet gentleman is accompanied by a great flock of elves and pixies of varying ages and variously convincing appearance.  Brass bands of uncertain proficiency accompany the ensemble and the reindeer plod in a rather half-hearted manner from one end of the town to the other and back again, with everyone following in their wake.

The reindeer, in case you were wondering, are shipped all the way from Scotland at great expense and return to their farm after the event.  I don't know about you but I have always thought reindeer singularly unprepossessing animals.  They have a moth-eaten and downtrodden appearance, as if they know that their sole purpose in life is to be eaten by wolves.  Joie de vivre is a feeling quite unknown to them.

Moreover, they are actually much smaller than one imagines they should be and I think this lack of physicality must be a tremendous disappointment to children used to seeing cartoons of magnificent beasts the size of carthorses with noses flashing like a demented fire alarm.

Which makes me wonder who it was that decided that St Nicholas, or Santa Claus, should use these - of all creatures - as a propulsive force.  Horses would be much more energetic and, of course, considerably more visual.  Somehow I think the reindeer got the part without auditioning.

For instance, if you are beguiled by the thought of an animal from the cold snowy wastes, how about the moose?  With a little imagination you could visualise a gift-laden sled pulled through the sky by a giant moose whose antlers flapped like Dumbo's ears.  Indeed elephants might be even more majestic and you'd think,  now that the world's population had reach nine billion,  Santa could use some extra traction.  Or, to revert to the North Pole again and being ecological at the same time, a couple of polar bears would be most impressive with red scarves around their necks.

But Reindeer!  Well - fine for trudging through the snow and living on moss and providing hides for moccasins and tents - even acceptable for the occasional dish of stringy stew - but for racing across the heavens with names like Donner and Blitzen, surely not.  Reindeer are just not cut out for the part, I'm sorry.

Still, there we are.  Like it or not reindeer have cornered the Santa sled pulling market and are not about to be displaced, despite the generations of disappointed children whom I am absolutely sure would far prefer polar bears and elephants. (In fact left to themselves children would invent a far superior myth in which there were a whole family of Santas - one for each continent maybe - with superhero vehicles - why would you want a sled in Africa? - pulled by a whole zoological garden of different creatures).

Anyway we have digressed as we usually do.  The Reindeer came to Cowbridge last Sunday with Santa in tow and into the town flocked thousands upon thousands of people.  Cars were parked up to a mile out of town. In every roadway a steady stream of buggies, babies, Mums, Dads and excited children streamed down the hillsides into the valley bottom in the hope of seeing the reindeer and receiving a species of papal blessing from the man in the scarlet coat and a chance to remind him to bring the Nintendo rather than the X Box - if that wouldn't be too much of a bother - and please could an elf be sure to take out a pencil and write down the request to avoid bringing the wrong thing as happened last year which meant that Mummy and Daddy had to take Santa's present back to a shop and try to exchange it all at great expense.

Our little town houses about 5,000 souls.  Adding a further 25,000 and, what's more,  cramming them into the centre creates something that is a cross between a rugby scrum and the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, Frances, you will excuse me if I say I didn't attend this year's parade.  Instead I walked away from town and up to the Tump, there on a sunny morning to contemplate the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond.  I was quite alone with my visions of Moose and Elephants, Horses and Polar Bears and the parade they made in my mind was infinitely superior to the one below.

Then I had a very fine lunch in Loch Fyne's restaurant with theatre friends and forgot, thankfully, all about the reindeer, while the 25,000 and, we hope, their satisfied children, trudged up the hill back to their cars. 

(The picture showing Santa, a couple of bemused children, an Elf and an Elfette and, if you look very closely, a sprig of reindeer horn (I told you they were unprepossessing) is courtesy of the website of our very fine local paper, the Cowbridge Gem, which, if you Google it, will tell you all practical details about the parade and why it is counted such a success).

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

A similar Bobble.  You'll have to imagine this in orange

We are a month away from Christmas.  I know this because various members of the family start whispering about whether you have any ideas about what ‘x’ would like to find in their stocking, which leads inevitably on to what you would like to find in your stocking.  I am hopeless at answering.  What I would really like is either ridiculously expensive or completely inappropriate, or probably both.  Otherwise my wants are small, at least in the present department.

Some people are instinctive present choosers.  Without a great deal of thought or effort they go into a shop and buy a present both useful and a surprise.  Probably inexpensive as well for which, I think, you should get bonus points.  Any fool can be a success at present buying if money is no object.

My eldest sister is one such person.  She once bought me a woollen bobble hat - she was living in Shetland at the time - and the hat, though improbably knitted in orange and brown, was clearly modelled on the hats worn by the local fishermen and fitted snugly around the ears.  It was crowned with a large orange bobble and I remember it also had a flap around the base which could be pulled down during a severe inclemency so that the hat would cover everything north of the mouth. 

That it then covered the eyes would not have mattered.  You can’t really see anything anyway in a Shetland gale; it is hard enough to stand up, all you can do is to cower against the elemental forces of nature. Anyway, your hat wouldn’t blow away.

Living then as I did in the docile atmosphere of the home counties I was still glad to own such a garment and wore it almost daily.  In that game you play if you can’t sleep, where you rank your chattels in order so that if ever your house catches fire you know what to take first, it found a high place.

The hat wore out, of course,  as all things do.  The first casualty was the bobble. Mind you, I wasn’t sorry for I thought the bobble an unnecessary frivolity, particularly when coloured orange.  I suppose it might have been useful had I been engulfed by an avalanche, but that wasn't likely in Essex.

Minus bobble, the hat went on for a very long time before finally succumbing to moths.  I have a new one now but this doesn’t quite match the practicality of the old hand-knitted version.  It is also a light grey, which, while a tad less disreputable, is an unfortunate colour in the event of an avalanche.

Someone else once gave me a pair of Timberland gloves, fleece lined on the inside, tough without ever being bulky and made of leather,  soft as a second skin.  The sort of gloves that pilots used in the days before cockpit heating and when the dress code called for sheepskin jackets.  They, too, were a most effective present and worn till they fell apart.

But to revert to the pilots a moment.  Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen a pilot wearing  insulated headgear.  Why? You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a pilot in a very cold plane (I am talking of fifty, even a hundred years ago) might need to wear something warm as a bearskin?

Yet if I remember correctly from those early films such as the one of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic with his plane covered in ice, he wore no headgear at all, or just perhaps a leather helmet.  I’m sure a bobble hat would have been useful.

When did Lindbergh fly from New York to Paris? Was it 1929? Or 1927? Or 1925?  It is the sort of question that might well have cropped up at the Great Annual Rotary Quiz that took place in the Town Hall here last Saturday and to which le tout Cowbridge turns out.  The questions this year were harder than last and were full of such silly forced-choice questions which do not suit my mental mechanics at all.  CADS - our drama society - usually put in two teams. Last year we came fourth.  This year we came tenth, equal with the other CADS team.  Actors don’t like forced choices, you see. 

Still the annual late November quiz reminds you that Christmas is on its way and to turn your attention to serious present buying.  If in doubt I can recommend a hand-knitted bobble hat from Shetland and a pair of soft Timberland gloves, regardless of whether you are buying for old or young, male or female, town or country mouse.  You may be thought an old miser but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of your affection will be warm this winter and probably safe in an avalanche as well.

(The picture shows a Shetland type Bobble Hat made by Barbour, courtesy of Sadler and Co.  For those desperate to know Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927.)