I Cooked my first Christmas Dinner last Night
I’m sixty-two and last night I cooked my first Christmas Dinner.
Because of the snow and travel problems, I had bought a Marks and Spencer Turkey Breast Joint, in case I have to spend Christmas alone. But with last night’s snow, I had two extra mouths to feed, so I decided to cook the turkey.
I was aided by some broccoli and parsnips donated by a farmer and luckily I had potatoes and some ready-prepared Schwatz gravy. Note that that gravy is gluten-free, so it’s fine for coeliacs like me. My guests don’t like sprouts, so they stayed in the fridge.
It was very passable. All my guests enjoyed it.
I even enjoyed the parsnips, which my mother used to cook so badly with the potatoes. I just followed the rules on the BBC web site. This must be the font of all knowledge for novice cooks like me.
Hopefully, the weather will relent by Christmas Day.
Paul and Rachel Chandler
Paul and Rachel Chandler are the couple who were seized from their yacht by Somali pirates. This is the last piece of news about them in The Times on the 13th of December.
These two paragraphs admit the truth about the Navy’s non-involvement.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) yesterday admitted that Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, had authorised a Royal Marine unit that witnessed the kidnapping to intervene. But it said it was the ship’s commander who decided it was unsafe to attempt a rescue.
The RFA Wave Knight was within 50 yards of the pirates and had a marine unit and a Merlin helicopter aboard. But Sir Mark Stanhope, the first sea lord, claimed the ship did not have the expertise required for a hostage rescue.
After that nothing has been reported!
Whether or not the commander should have intervened is open to question, as every squaddie I’ve ever met, would have been up to do it.
But perhaps the question that should be asked is why were the Marines on that ship without the equipment and training to intervene in a safe and successful manner?
On a wider point, Somalia is an absolute basket case and is yet another legacy of the incompetent Dubya. Read what was said in The Times yesterday.
This is the first two paragraphs.
Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Britain.
It has delivered a people that practised a moderate form of Islam into the hands of religious extremists. Its efforts to combat terrorism have turned Somalia into a launchpad for global jihad. Somalia is now the ultimate failed state whose mayhem threatens to destabilise the region and whose pirates maraud the vital shipping lanes off its shores. Its people endure Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
What I find so sad about Somalia, is that in the past I’ve done business with quite a few Somalis over telephone billing systems. I’ve always found them a quiet and mild people, who were a pleasure to work with.
What went wrong?
Let’s hope that the Chandlers get a quick solution to their ordeal.
But I suspect that will not happen as the impass between the British Government and their kidnappers is just too great.
Should we pay a ransom? I’m afraid that I agree with the Government here, in that if we do, then any UK national will then be at risk. And not just in the troubled parts of the world, as there an awful lot of criminals all over the world, who would see kidnapping as a nice little earner.
The Anonymous Widower 