Pipes, Presents, Preparations and Pins

Mum and dad's visit yesterday went well (just quick, not least because it's snowy and travel's unpleasant); today's social worker visit has been rearranged to the New Year—she's fallen in the snow and aggravated an injury, preventing driving.

The house is now fully decorated, and there's an inordinate amount of greenery through the rooms. Upstairs, as normal, has escaped significant adornment, but there's a lot of holly, ivy, pine, and decorations downstairs. We finished making runners for the windows, too, which all look good, and enliven the sills.

This evening, we've done some of the preparing for the Christmas lunch, making a mango sorbet and chicken liver pâté. The latter, we've made before, very successfully and easily. It's good made in advance, and sealed under butter: once it's started, though, it needs to be eaten quite quickly. Which is fine, admittedly, and never a problem. The sorbet is new to us, and was splendidly simple to create...and will, I hope, taste good.

Unfortunately, the recent cold weather froze the pipes in the roof space above the utility room, and they chose this afternoon to thaw...revealing that both pipes had split. After staunching the flow, I had to reach into the loft, remove the split sections of pipe, and spliced in repairs. The only things I had available were, in fact, stopcocks, which aren't quite normal, but function well as over-specified straight connectors. This being a one-man job (the hatch to the space is a foot square, and one can't climb in), I left Liz wrapping the Christmas presents, and at least the tree now looks complete. Extra lagging is on order for the pipes: while I was up there, I've also installed loft insulation, as there was a minimum already in place.