Andy Richardson: Making sure not to be the true turkey of Christmas

I have as much love for the present-giving festival as Boris does for anybody other than himself. Which is to say: none.

All that pressure. All that expectation. All that goddam turkey. Except, thankfully, there is never any goddam turkey.

I long since subscribed to the view of a chef friend that the best thing to do with a Christmas turkey is stick it in the bin.

And so after a memorable festive lunch for a former girlfriend that climaxed when I accidentally melted plastic plates on a really hot oven top, sending full-on festive dinners through the cracks, I’ve sacked it off. Twenty years and still going strong. Turkey, you have no dominion here.

And yet, for all the carefully cultivated avoidance of – shhh, the C Day – preparations have to be made to eat something decent.

It’s the same on C Day as it is on any bank holiday; the shops are shut and so a last-minute trip to Sainsbo’s is out of the question.

And this year, with C Day being on a Saturday, followed by B Day and then a Bank Holiday, that meant stocking up properly.

Omicron, however, had other plans.

And so to solve the dilemma of not having anything decent to eat when the shops were shut for three days while making sure I didn’t get a dose of Covid at the vegetable aisle, I turned to Google.

In a flurry of un-festive derring-do, I did the thing all non-believers do, ordered my favourite food.

And so a box of 35-day aged beef burgers loaded with cheese, pickles and marrownaise – yes, marrownaise is a thing – were bought and scheduled for delivery on December 23.

Winning At Life. As a back-up, I bought two packets of bacon and a huge bag of potatoes. Because even non-believers love a bacon sandwich on C Day morning and it’s one of life’s truisms that you can’t go wrong with a bag of potatoes.

And then the phone rang.

A friend told me about an even better deliver-by-courier box meal containing a rib of beef, olives, roast potatoes, carrots, parsnips, a fabulously decadent dessert and enough pigs in blankets to end the annual pigs in blankets famine. Boom. I was in. And so, on December 23, I waited.

We would have enough food to last for two weeks, which, given the wildfire spread of Omicron, would be no bad thing.

We could eat roast beef with more trimmings than a Downing Street party or flip burgers and listen to Elvis. Every Day. For two weeks. Ha. When we do C Day, we do it in style.

It got to 5.45pm on December 23. The DPD man hadn’t come. Nor had the UPS man – though, let’s face it, the UPS man never comes, the stuff he’s supposed to deliver just goes back to the person who sent it after three weeks.

But I digress – just like the UPS man.

I called the burger place. A waitress provided a masterclass in disinterest and disengagement, telling me to email an inbox that was unmanned and wouldn’t be covered until long after C Day.

Thanks. The courier with the beef box did answer the phone, thankfully, and said he’d not seen a box. We were the Cinderellas of C Day dining and the clock was moving rapidly towards midnight.

December 24 came and by 4pm I was primed to deliver the news to She Who Must Be Obeyed. “Yes, dear, I know you’re caring for the sick and the needy all day as you keep the country going, but look forward to getting home at 3pm after an 8-hour shift and you can feast on, erm, a jacket potato.”

Like rubbish buses, the couriers did arrive. One left a box on the front door step at 5pm. The other left a box out in the rain that we retrieved around 10pm.

And, yes, a week after C Day, we still haven’t polished off the nosh.

For all of my beef with couriers, I made sure I wouldn’t be this year’s Christmas Day turkey.