Not another bloody mince pie recipe!

Every year it's the same. Out come the revamped Christmas food articles in the weekend papers and magazines: How to cook the perfect turkey; 7 steps to a foolproof pudding...on and on they drone. The celebrity chef who happens to be flavour of the month will pop up all over the place - this year it's Gordon Ramsey who turns up on the front cover of The Times magazine in a tutu, which is enough to put most of us off our turkey.

There is a limit to what you can do with a Christmas meal so we get the inevitable off-the-wall stuff such as 'sweet potatoes and marshmallows' or 'non-conformist Christmas pudding' ( figs, cocoa, blueberries, coffee liqueur...you get the idea) from Tim Norrington- Davies in The Sunday Telegraph. To fill those long, empty hours between now and Christmas we can make a couple of jars of 'satsumas in cider brandy' or 'spiced pears' or perhaps some 'celebratory biscuits'. This is in a land where more people eat in MacDonalds on a Sunday than cook a roast dinner. The truth is that, come Christmas Day, the country will stink of overcooked brussel sprouts destined to accompany dried up Bernard Mathews' factory-turkey, moistened with instant gravy.

And Me?
I'll be cooking for 38 on Christmas day.
A large family gathering?
Not likely!These buggers are paying £75 a head. That's 38 people who will not be in the slightest bit interested in what ideas Jamie Oliver or Nigella have for the festive season. And it will be 38 people guaranteed not to have to suffer the culinary inadeqacies of daughters-in-law, mothers-in-law or whoever's turn it is to cook for the family this year.

And no washing up!