Building a Nest

Winter has announced its arrival. There is a frostiness in the air and a crackle underfoot. This is when things gets cosy. We bring out our winter clothes, unfolding wool and cashmere, cleaning boots, buying a new hat that probably doesn't suit us and that will, come March, be relegated to the back of the wardrobe and forgotten about. The heating gets turned on. The shop windows gleam brazenly with Christmas decorations, and the trees are ablaze with gold and bronze. At night, everything twinkles.

The cold, or the change in light, makes us giddy, pushing us into party mood. At what other time of the year would it be acceptable to dress up as ghosts and ghouls and slutty vampire nurses, handing out sweets and bits of plastic tat to children who knock at our door all evening? Or to stuff two pairs of tights with newspaper to make a grotesque Guy to fling gleefully on a big fire and watch burn whilst stickily pecking at floury apples covered in toffee? It's mid-November and all most of us want to do is deck the halls and fill the cupboards. This is the time for nest-building.

Our food shopping also changes. We start to write long shopping lists. I buy dry goods in abundance and take great pleasure in filling the kitchen shelves with heavy packets of rice, couscous, pasta, pulses and industrial quantities of flour and sugar. The house is constantly filled with the smell of baking; plates of cakes and pastries adorn every surface and everything in the kitchen is covered in a blizzard of icing sugar. There is a cauldron of wine and spices mulling on the back-hob at all times. On the table is a bowl of huge rubied pomegranates and a crate of clementines, their leaves still attached. They look beautiful. At the weekend, there will be shellfish, oysters probably, at their sea-salty best right now. These luxuries are what make this time of year so intoxicating, along with the romance that comes with snuggling up in blankets, lighting candles and drinking warm things when it's cold and dark outside.

So get the shopping in, fill the pantry, make a nest. And revel in this time because, before you know it, Christmas will be gone and drizzly, grey February will be looming. Joy to the world!