The Feast of St Nicholas

The 6th of December is the Feast of St Nick. Not the jolly fat bloke in the red suit (that was hijacked by the Victorians.) But still suitably festive. We decorated the largest tower with holly and ivy and a minstrel strummed carols on a dulcimer while we were at work. Yes, it was cold but not desperately so. Minus 4.5 C at night but we were quite cosy in the tent. Thanks to the large gas heater that we swiped from my dad.

V in the outer bailey

We were dressed very warmly too - linen, silk and wool cannot be beaten for their thermal properties and V even had a fur collar (fake cos it's hard to get real wolf round here any more )

That very elegantly shaped window that you can see behind V's left shoulder belongs to the large kitchen so you can imagine that the chap who built this castle was not short of a penny or two. However, we cooked in the small kitchen tower which with two fires blazing and the bread oven going was the warmest spot to be - apart from our tent of course :o)

Myself and Mistress Pat in the small kitchen tower.

I spent most of my time helping to prepare the feast- pottage (vegetable stew) roast beef and spit roast lamb, roasted vegetables including potatoes which although they weren't around in Britain the 1300s it was felt that beef wouldn't be beef unless there was a roastie cuddled up next to it. The beef and the vegetables were cooked in the bread oven built into the tower wall but the lamb was spit roasted over an open fire. They tasted magnificent - I think I am ruined for beef now. There was a sweet furmenty for pudding - I had never tried this before and it was an acquired taste, flavoured with rose water and sugar it was unusual but fun to eat food made to a really ancient recipe. There were also dates stuffed with marchpane (marzipan) and crispalls which are some kind of small, intensely sweet cake. I don't really know what they tasted like because the archers scarfed the lot down as a kind of aperitif. We also had mulled wine and mulled cider to keep the chill out which worked very nicely.

Above is a picture of the outer bailey where we camped. Our tent is the one to the right, next to the fancy blue and yellow stripey one. It was rather hard getting out into the chill of the early morning. The girls elected to stay in bed until lunchtime and it later turned out that what I thought was tiredness brought on by a late night and fresh air was in fact the starting of tonsillitis which they in turn passed on to me - blah - so we have been busy with that most of this week. Back to earth with a thump as usual!

However, there has been one consolation when stuck in bed with sick children who will not let me move one inch away from them lest I get weak, queroulous calls of Mummy, Mummy! And that is that I finally managed to read all of Ken Follets World Without End which at about a thousand pages is a proper cockroach killer of a book. Thoroughly absorbing stuff if you can leave behind the taint of the horror that the Black Death must have been. Still 600 years is a long time to brood over something like that. Shake it off girl, shake it off.

Hope you and yours are well and blooming. Prayers and good vibes welcomed for three kids and a mum who aren't really.