- The culmination of our week was our family Xmas. A yearly do where we turn up to a family member’s house and everyone mucks in to make a Christmas Dinner. This year was our turn and various extended family members made the long trip to our house to sit, cramped around an extended table with 22 others and eat mediocre mushroom wellingtons and drink home-made port wine. Great fun.
- Catering tips when you have 23 people in your 2-up-2-down london terrace:
- Think of jobs people can do end to end. Not just “peel sprouts” but “get these vegetables ready to cook”
- Think of things people can bring to make them feel useful and also that are useful. But be prepared if they’re delayed.
- Soup for 23 is about 3-4 litres
- You always need more parsnips than you think.
- You always need more gravy than you think.
- Order good weather.
- Stop trying to borrow all the extra table space and rent everything. Deal with professionals to reduce stress.
- Condensed milk cannot be taken on a plane even if its been turned into caramel
- As part of this the kids had some cousin kids stay over and luckily these other kids are as much into Dragons as our kids are. So they spent the whole weekend playing dragons on the roof of the shed. and running up and down our two flights of stairs to get more dragons and pretending their dragons were in a cave underneath the trestle tables and not worrying at all about their dragons crashing weightily through the knees of our octogenarian visitors.
- We also took the gang on a trip to the William morris gallery which really was a chance for me to do all the kid activities while the kids played on the ‘William morris company manager” game. A novel interactive museum screen where they play at increasing the public awareness of the William morris brand. It involves employing fictional stained glass window designers and legendary arts and craft mavericks and accepting various historically tangential jobs. The end state being that capitalism always crushes the players dreams and ruins the company.