Weekend

A very happy weekend with the children, and incorporating a flying visit frommanjushra, who drove 500 miles to be coughed at.  Wonderful to see her.
I baked another two fruit cakes with my daughter, to replace the ones which I burned last week (the burned ones, suitably hacked about and sliced, were good enough to go on a stall at a school Christmas fair on Saturday).  I adjusted cooking time and temperature considerably to suit my fan oven.  If my fresh-out-of-the-tin testing of one of the cakes is anything to go by, they are the best fruit cakes I've ever baked.  Maybe the best fruit cakes I've ever tasted. Really, that good.  Yum.

dark winter nights

For anyone else out there who doesn't much like the dark afternoons and mornings, my seasonal notice:

The winter solstice is on 22nd December at 06:08.

The darkest evening in the northern hemisphere comes about a week before the solstice. This year it is on 14th December, with sunset in Manchester at 15:50 (I am liable to greet people with "Happy Sunset Day" on this date). The darkest morning is on 30th December, with sunrise in Manchester at 08:25.