The redwings hung around long enough today that I had time to run and fetch my camera, and I took pictures of them from the bedroom window for a while (wishing I had cleaned the windows more recently so that my pictures would have been a bit sharper). This photo is from a few days ago, when one landed on our lawn.

After the redwings flew off, I heard a bit of noise outside and so went to the same window to have a look. Quite a few birds were squawking, and flying across our garden from east to west. It soon became clear why: a male sparrowhawk flew right across the garden. He flew low, close to the fences and passing right by a couple of our birdfeeders. I saw him fly into a tree a few gardens down, where he perched for a minute or two before flying away. Whenever a sparrowhawk has passed through the garden, it’s always quiet for a few minutes – I think the smaller birds go quiet and try to remain hidden in case there is a return visit.

Little by little the birds started to return, and again I heard noise. This time it was a local cat, chasing squirrels. Luckily there were three squirrels, and they seemed rather better organised than the cat, taunting him from a tree they had climbed.

Of course there is a reason for all this activity: this weekend is the annual RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, an event we have taken part in every year since we first had a garden of our own. We’ve found in previous years that as soon as we sit down to do the birdwatch, all the birds that regularly visit our garden disappear. So I rather suspect that the birds are being busy today so that they can hide for the rest of the weekend and avoid being counted.

As you can see from this photo, I even borrowed a cake stand. I don’t have a cake stand of my own, and it’s not something I can use often – let’s just say our cat requires constant supervision, and it would not be wise to leave cakes on display for more than three seconds. It may sound like I’m being unfair, but she has a track record with this sort of thing… (Also applies to: lasagnes.)

These are tiramisu cupcakes, made using a recipe from a book I was given for Christmas – Life’s Better With A Cupcake. They were delicious – I shall be making them again very soon.

You make a simple cupcake mix using brown sugar, and then when you’ve baked them, you use a skewer to poke holes in the top. You mix up a simple sweetened coffee syrup, and drizzle it into the holes. The frosting is a mix of sugar, mascarpone cheese, and marsala wine (or, in my case, Kahlua). Happily, there was too much frosting, so I had to finish the leftovers.

We also served fondant fancies, as for some reason I find these to be a key component of afternoon tea. I love the lemon ones, and the pink ones, but can’t really understand why they bother with the chocolate ones – they don’t taste very chocolatey, and they clash a bit with the other flavours. Maybe some day they will be phased out, and I will be able to buy boxes of just the pink and yellow ones. Or maybe I should stop rambling and get on with some jobs round the house…!

A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned she was interested in going to the local Magistrates’ Court to see what goes on. I didn’t even know you could do this – but you can. Each of the courtrooms has a public gallery, and as long as you behave, you’re allowed to sit in and see justice being served.

Our local court sits from 10am, but someone I know who serves there as a magistrate advised us to get there for 10.30am – she said there are often delays at the start of the day, with witnesses failing to turn up, and papers needed to be checked. When we arrived, we had to walk through an airport-style scanner, and our bags were x-rayed. There is a reception desk, and I was told that’s the place to go first – to ask which of the court rooms is likely to be of most interest to the casual observer. There seemed to be quite a few court rooms in action, and they gave us the details of which ones were busiest that day.

We started in one of the smaller courtrooms, where the public gallery is simply a row of seats at the back of the room. Within a few minutes, it became clear to us that the defendants are made to sit there while they wait to be called up. So, when we moved on to the next court room, we sat a little farther down the row, putting a bit of space between us and them. During the afternoon, in a larger court, the public gallery was almost a separate room, separated from the rest of the room by a wall of glass. This made us feel a bit more secure, until things got a bit heated. The mother of a defendant, on hearing that he was going to be held in custody, started shouting and swearing and generally making a scene. Until she leapt up to press her face to the glass screen, she was sitting right behind us. The magistrate had her thrown out, then arrested and brought back in as a defendant. She was made to apologise and then allowed to leave – apparently, she could have been sent to prison for four weeks for behaving that way. Yikes.

We saw a cross-section of society there, but they were nearly all men. They were there for drink-driving, shoplifting, stealing motorbikes, assaulting police officers, and fighting. For the most part, things were conducted quickly and without any time being wasted – there were delays when translators were needed, or because certain witnesses had been unable (or unwilling) to attend. For most of the defendants, it was not their first time in front of a magistrate.

But for me, it was all new. I came away feeling satisfied that things seem to be conducted more or less as I would expect them to be, but disappointed to see just how busy the courts are – as you can see from this photo I snapped with my phone on the way in, it’s a big building, and if everyone behaved as they should, we wouldn’t need it. I was also a bit surprised by some of the fines and other punishments handed out – shoplifters in particular seem to get an easy ride, with little to deter them from having a go. The drink-drivers had their driving licences taken off them there and then, and the brawlers were given court dates and told they will face trial in the near future.

It was an interesting day.

I thought you might like to see this picture of a fieldfare in our garden, brought here by the sudden change in the weather. They don’t live in England year-round, and it’s rare that we get one in the garden. We could see a few more of them a few gardens away, in a large tree that was providing a perch to plenty of fieldfares and redwings, who seem to travel round together.

While the cold snap has brought us these welcome visitors, it’s also done a number on my daffodils, which had bloomed rather early, fooled by the mild weather we’d been experiencing. If I’d known how much damage the frost would do to them, I would have harvested them and put them in a vase. A lesson learned for next time.

While we waited for my parents to arrive for lunch, we listened to Christmas music (I am beyond thrilled with my recently-acquired Christmas music. I made a mix of alternative festive songs, featuring the Ramones, Caitlin Rose, Ryan Adams, Smashing Pumpkins, and so on, and it’s changed how I feel about Christmas music. Which is to say there’s a lot of it that I try to avoid hearing.) It wasn’t what you’d call a traditional Christmas meal, but it was stress-free and all the more fun as a result. We had pizza, and Nigella Lawson’s girdlebuster pie (which I had made last weekend). If you ever make this pie, do not cover it in clingfilm once you’ve poured on the butterscotch topping – the butterscotch will stick to the clingfilm, and you will spend ages trying to save it before the ice cream melts.

After lunch – also cheating on tradition – we exchanged and OPENED presents. On Christmas Eve! Outrageous! (Well, not in some countries. But certainly a cause for eyebrows to be raised here in England.)

The beautifully-wrapped presents you can see here came from my mother, and they were so pretty I was a little reluctant to open them. The one on the top of the pile is wrapped in a map from the little part of Switzerland we like to visit, and inside was a 1940s book about Switzerland. There was an inscription inside which made clear that it has been given as a Christmas present before, to someone’s father, back in 1946. Lovely to think that more than 50 years on, it has become a Christmas present once again.

I can remember one Christmas in my early teens, I made what seemed like miles of paper chains to decorate my bedroom for Christmas. I made them from the pages of Smash Hits – British readers may well remember this fortnightly music magazine. I thought my paper chains were the bees’ knees – they were certainly an excellent complement to the silver tinsel Christmas tree I had (Woolworth’s finest…).

For you, I have upped the stakes a little and made two sets of patterns that you can download, so hopefully one of them will match your chosen Christmas colourscheme. You can also mix and match the sets.

I made myself a set this afternoon, and it’s a really simple project to sit and do – all you need is to print out one or both of the PDFs below, then cut up the strips and use glue or double-sided tape to stick them together. If you have children who could do with being occupied for half an hour or so, this is a good project for them.

Files to download:

Red and blue paper chains

Green paper chains

Thank you for visiting me here at Busywork this year. I love to get your emails and comments, and I’m grateful for your company. I hope you have a lovely Christmas, that all your baking turns out as you hoped, that Father Christmas makes it down your chimney without causing any damage, and that your relatives are on their best behaviour.

I had already made a Christmas stocking containing a hot chocolate kit before I saw Megan’s latest project, but I wish I’d seen it sooner as it would fit into a Christmas stocking much more neatly than the things I put together. I will remember it for next year.

Technically this is from last Christmas, but it stands up to repeat viewings: the Simon’s Cat christmas tree cartoon. If you have ever lived with a cat, you will no doubt have experienced something very similar.

I am going to spare myself the stress that making this Yule Log would no doubt entail, but I have enjoyed looking at it. Perhaps I will buy one instead. I do plan to make Nigella Lawson’s Girdlebuster Pie though – I will let you know how it turns out.

And last but by no means least, my very talented friend Eloise has had tea towels made using her artwork. They are made here in England,which I find reassuring in these dark days when jobs are thin on the ground. Most importantly, they are lovely – I imagine most people wouldn’t dream of using them to dry their dishes!

In the interests of not always ordering from the same small range of drinks every time I go out, last night I asked the waitress for drink suggestions, and she came up with a good one: Disaronno and cranberry juice. It tastes like a cherry bakewell – but with alcohol.

I haven’t been spending all my time drinking: there has been good progress with the Christmas preparations too. The lights are up. Some of the cards are written. Things have been posted to far-flung places. All of the parcels have been wrapped (well, with the exception of a couple more that I bought this week. I find the problem with getting things ready early for Christmas is that I often end up spending more overall, because I continue to see things I think people will like, and so I keep buying).

I have even done some sewing: I made a Christmas stocking as a gift for a friend. I used some grey velvet fabric from Ikea, with red ribbon at the top. It is not very photogenic, for some reason, but in person it looks very nice and I am pleased with it (you can see it here). I’m going to fill it with hot chocolate mix, Flakes, and marshmallows. I based the shape of the stocking on this excellent free pattern from Denyse  Schmidt, but rather than a quilted stocking, I just made a plain one, with a cotton lining. (As ever when I try to make things with a lining, I sat for a very long time working out which way round everything needed to be sewn, so that when turned right side out there would be no visible stitching and everything would be facing the right way. It was a huge relief to get this right first time round on this project – I have had to unpick things and redo them in the past.)

I have a couple of other projects planned: some lavender pillows, and another free paper chain pattern for you. Like the Halloween paper chains I made, it will be a free PDF that you can print out, cut up, and turn into paper chains for your house/office. I have been consulting with my creative director (hello Mother!) on what patterns and colours to use, and will be getting to work on that over the weekend.

It had been a dark and foggy day, but the sun was just starting to make its presence known when we arrived at my parents’ house just after 2pm. Mum had lit lots of candles, and the house looked very pretty, with just a few hints of Christmassy decorations starting to appear.

I made the lemon fairy cakes you can see in this picture, finishing them just before we set off. That meant I didn’t have time to test them, but I needn’t have worried as they were very good. (This more than makes up for the poor cooking I did last weekend!). They are from a recipe in the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, a book I’ve been really pleased with so far.

Anyway, speaking of Christmas… how are your preparations going? I had planned to get all of my Christmas shopping done in November as I struggle to enjoy being in shops in December – I find it all a bit overwhelming. But I had failed to notice that December starts NEXT WEEK. So I might not quite manage to have finished by then. We’ll see.

And I think I am going to leap into Christmas rather early this year – I usually am rather slow to put the decorations up, but this time I think I will put them up early and enjoy them for longer.  Anna at Twelve 22 put her tree up on the 9th of November! I think I might do my decorations in the first few days of December, which is early by my standards.

I’m just on a bit of a go-slow, and haven’t been on the computer so much. I have been doing some Christmas shopping – my aim is to get it all done by the end of the month, so that I can relax and enjoy December.

I have also been experiencing a (small) run of cooking failures. Well, failures is perhaps a little harsh, but successes they were not. Our neighbour gave us two enormous butternut squashes from her mother’s allotment, and we’ve really not done them justice. We have one left, and so I’m looking for recipes that will make it shine. Our mistake with the first one was to roast it – and leave it in the oven for rather too long. That resulted in a roast squash, red onion and creme fraiche pasta dish that was horrible. Inedible. Binned.

Being the efficient types we are, we’d roasted extra squash, to make into a risotto the following night (with plans for that to then provide leftovers for two lunches). But once you’ve over-roasted a butternut squash, you should just cut your losses and bin it. We didn’t, because we don’t like to throw food away. So we made a passable risotto – but didn’t bother preserving the leftovers.

Next up: cookies. Hmm. I tried a recipe for peanut brownie cookies, and again I think I overcooked them. They are somewhat crunchy. I had guests today, and didn’t offer them one, because I worried they might chip a tooth.

For tomorrow’s tea, I’m just going to heat up something from M&S. Hopefully that will clean the slate a bit.