The true season for turkey and ham and pudding falls not on Christmas Day but on those mellow and melancholy days which follow, when one can reflect on the waning season, the imminent year, and on life. Then is the turkey (and its companions) at its best, somewhat freed of its grosser companions of alcoholic excess and noise which tend to obliterate both taste and memory. Even aside from the distracting intensity of Christmas, the food we provide on that day is, like revenge, best taken cold. The flavour of the brown meat of a free-range turkey reaches heavenly proportions after a day of contemplating the wisdom of its juices; ham is royally enriched by the mucus of its own gelatinous devising; bread sauce, left on its own like Mozart with 24 hours to produce a score, can devise some truly delightful palatal melodies; and as for Christmas pudding, brandy butter, rum sauce - ah well now, does the Choral Symphony not come to mind?
The Stephen's Day walk to blow the yulewebs from the frontal lobes is one of the great rites of this time of year. The stomach juices churning like a washing-machine on a slow cycle, the dogs bounding and yelping after illusive or elusive quarry, the sun setting as the chill rises from the icy December clay - and one can almost hug oneself at the thought of the feast ahead, consumed in peace beside a crackling log fire. It was during such a walk, amid an alimentary reflection over the imminent prospect of dark nutty meat, sucked from the generous and juicy confines of a turkey wing, that suddenly the trees around me bowed like dress-uniformed dragoons at a ball as the dance begins.
Wind in a wood
Have you ever been in a wood when a hurricane comes to call? It is quite beyond my power to give appropriate advice with the power I would wish. But in essence, what I am saying is: in preference, be in Kosovo, be in a balloon with Richard Branson, coat yourself with honey and consort with bears, open up an Israeli tourist office in the kasbah in Algiers or enter the Iraqi national song contest with a little ditty called "Saddam Hussein is a Zionist Sodomite". In other words, be elsewhere. For when, as far as the eye can see, trees are touching their toes, and huge boughs are whirling past you like freshly-flung maidens in a polka after the dragoons have had a rum-punch too many, elsewhere is the only place to be.
Of course the problem is that elsewhere can often be an extremely hard place to find, especially when one is trying to cajole five - yes, five - ecstatic dogs out of a howling arboreal typhoon, for such conditions are pure liver and bacon to a dog's taste for fun. All those sticks to fetch - though the sticks were of course 100-foot beech trees, bounding across the landscape like cricket-stumps off on their summer holidays.
Setting sail
Finally, with the dogs scooped, scraped, bawled, beaten, whipped and flogged into the jalopy, we set sail for home. I speak literally. At one point we were overtaken by something large and dark and swirling, yet somehow vaguely familiar. Of course. Offaly. Followed by largish tracts of Tipperary. Bits of Thurles - the cathedral, say - are very recognisable, even at 100 m.p.h. and heading for the Hebrides at 500 feet. I even paused in the fond hope of seeing bits of Kerry containing Jackie Healy-Rae making a similar journey, en route for Inverness, where he could swiftly embitter the pill of Scottish Home Rule, but in that fond hope I was sadly disappointed. Ah, well. Maybe next time. Now, onward to home.
Home. Ah yes, home, a journey of many diversions due to felled trees and crackling ESB cables. Home turned out to be Muroroa Atoll, with doors to the outhouses flapping off hinges like tea-towels on a washing line, even as a neighbouring farm unloaded the odd barn or two onto my lawn. Being a man of rare decision, I locked the hounds, all five of them, in the boot-room, and tried to shut the outhouse doors. When that didn't work, I tried to jam them open. When that didn't work, I tried to furl them.
Phoning ESB
And when that didn't work, I ran in the kitchen door, so avoiding the dogs, in order to ring the ESB and inform them their electricity was leaking out of their cables all over the place and forming in big pools on the road. Even as I dialled, I was able to see the Rock of Cashel pass right by my kitchen window. By now it is probably the Rock of Aughtermuchty.
At the very second that I reported my findings to the ESB, I heard a contented belch from the boot-room. A micro-moment later I had the connecting door open, and recumbent on the floor with huge bellies, with satisfied looks on their faces and with post-prandial cigars in their mouths were the five resident dogs. Beside them, licked perfectly clean, were the dishes which minutes before had borne almost an entire turkey, the greater part of a huge ham, and a positively imperial Christmas pudding: gone, all gone.
Dogs agree. Turkey and ham and pudding are at their best after Christmas. Spam, not. I know.