On the front line of Christmas meal planning

So I was going to go to bed and read my book but then realised that my husband had already gone to bed and put off the light, which means I'll need to sneak in stealthily and not put the light on and not read and not wake him. And that's just pants. So instead I'll tell you about my evening.

I have spent the ENTIRE evening planning our Christmas eating extravaganza. Normally this is something I love doing. This year it's been hard work. Mainly because I'm tired. The bags under my eyes keep getting in the way of my pencil as I scribble out menu ideas. But also because last year and the year before I felt I kinda outdid myself (if I don't mind saying so myself) so really I can only go downhill from here.

I rushed out and bought the Nigella Christmas book today - that's how sad I am. It's not that I want to learn how to voluptuously lick bread sauce off a spoon, I just need some inspiration. And I found it. But sadly, I didn't limit myself to Nigella. I've also called on Gary Rhodes, several different Olive magazines from Christmasses past, my Cocktails book and a second Nigella book, with Delia loitering in the background as a standby.

My Christmas meal planning goes as follows:

List the meals you need to provide for (plus the fillerey bits in between - these are the bits that ratchet up your grocery bill as you buy for every possible contingency but find you end up eating party favourite platters well into July)

Decide what you want for each of those meals. This is the hard part - just when I've decided on something like gingerbread muffins for breakfast on Christmas morning, I realise that I really want to make gingerbread stuffing for the turkey and can't possibly have a double gingerbread whammy. And so I have to start again.

This is not dissimilar to trying to find an outfit to go out in. You decide on the white blouse so pick a white bra for underneath and black jacket with matching black boots but then realise that the white blouse has a mark on it so need to go for the purple blouse instead but that requires a darker bra and a different jacket and therefore different boots not to mention a necklace. This is how my Christmas meals go. Just when I've decided on maple glazed parsnips, I realise that they clash badly with the honeyed beans and off we go again.

Once I'm just about bleeding from the eyeballs from the decision making - and have long since forced my husband off to the safe confines of his bed where he no longer has to hear me debating the merits of red cabbage with apple vs pear - I have my menu.

I then need to go through each recipe (which obviously I've made a note of which of the myriad of books it's come from) and determine what ingredients I need to buy. This isn't a simple exercise. I need to go and check the cupboards each time to make sure we don't already have star anise or whatever inane item I'll require for this one recipe and never again. I invariably end up buying another three bottles of cloves when we already have two and forget to buy butter - or something else essential.

Once I have my shopping list (this is the stage I got to by the end of my four hours), I have to split it into my Ocado shop being delivered on Friday as that was the only available sodding day left. Vs the things I need to buy next week and those are split into supermarket vs farmers market.

And then, I need to work out a timetable as to when I'll be cooking what. This requires miliary precision and I'd really like to call in my husband on this given he's ex-army and all that, but he can't understand any of this. He seems to think that nipping out to M&S on Christmas Eve and buying whatever's left on the shelves is cool. That said, his grand contribution to the entire evening's food debacle was, upon me asking whether we had enough gin and vodka in the house, to say: 'Yes, we need to buy more glasses. Ours are tatty.'

Exsqueeze me? You want me to add household durables to my list of perishable food items? Do not fuck with the Christmas shopping list dude.

I am hyped up. I can't possibly go to bed now, despite utter exhaustion. My head is too filled with spicy nuts and soy glazed chipplotas to sleep. Now I know why the Night Before Christmas poem talks of 'visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads'. It's not a nice dream they're having. It's a poor mother somewhere having a sodding food planning nightmare.

Right, am off to breathe deeply in a darkened corner.

Old PCs - where memories live (some of which should stay hidden forever)

My husband was just looking for the AOL cd for his new computer. He was hunting in 'the box of all things' (a must for every house) and discovered our old laptop. In contrast to current models, it looks and feels like a rather large paving slab. Husband wanted to throw it out. Not that I'm a hoarder or anything, but I said: 'No! It might have important information on it and besides the kids can play with it or we could sell it on eBay or get it recycled for charity or something else that will require a lot more effort from us than simply putting it in the bin.'

So I plugged it in and turned it on. Little did I know that the old pc was actually a time travel device that sucks you into a vortex to your past.

A few documents I have just found on the old machine are:

• my birth plan for our first son. Oh how the tears rolled down my face while I read it. What a complete and utter pile of poo. Like the birth was anything remotely close to what I wrote down. And as if the midwives even looked at it. Ha ha.

• the email I sent to friends just after giving birth to first son. Why, oh why, did I think it was acceptable to tell EVERYONE about the exact bodily fluids that came out of me during the birthing process? I now know that all women need to 'process the birth' but I think that the experts who say that, don't necessarily mean for you to share it with your entire email address list.

• Half-written business plans for the following businesses: One PR company (not my current one); Swaddleme (a company making swaddling blankets for babies. I recall at the time I even went out and bought a £15.99 sewing machine - only the best quality for me - and reams of fabric to make these blankets having never sewn anything in my entire life before or since); Nosh4nippers (a company that was going to make baby food only I got bored of pureeing my own children's carrots so why I'd do it for the rest of the planet I have no idea). I was just so desperately keen to run my own business (for that read: escape the monotony of looking after a small baby who just puked on me all day) that I came up with any number of crazy ideas spurred partly by sleep deprivation.

• The opening paragraphs or initial chapters of the following books I had begun to write: 'Help! My baby hasn't read the book!'; 'Princess Lulubelle and the Magic Rainbow'; 'Diary of a new mother'; 'The Startling Reality of Being Ordinary'. None got further than two pages in - probably interrupted by the need to feed a small child. But again, showing my brain's inability to accept being nothing else other than a person who wipes small bottoms for a living. And reinforcing the fact that I am a starter, rather than a finisher.

• A powerpoint presentation from my days of doing the PR for the IBM Storage account in the USA. It was a BBL (an acronym for a Brown Bag Lunch - an American term for giving your colleagues a short, snappy educational overview on something you're working on but which they will find very dull and would prefer to be having their lunch somewhere in a deli). It was cleverly called 'Stor Wars' and had the theme music and graphics from Star Wars. It had lots of corny references to 'The force being strong' and 'the mothership of all storage devices'. I obviously thought I was really hilarious back in my geek storage PR days.

• Emails from my bridezilla months when I was trying to organise THE MOST PERFECT WEDDING EVER, except that I wasn't living on the same continent as any of the guests or the wedding venue (which incidentally was in a remote part of South Africa and utterly incapable of keeping up with my New York City standards).

• Photographs of my husband and I from days before we were married and well before we had children. We look so young, so unwrinkled, so thin, so completely unaware of how a few short years would change us into haggard old farts without social lives.

It's time I stop looking at the old pc now because I don't think it's good for my self esteem. But one day when I'm bolstered by a glass of wine or two, I might revisit it. And possibly even finish some of those books. Or perhaps add just a line or two more.