Grace Dent

It's perfectly easy to make a British Christmas dinner for the very first time, even if you're not a remotely skilled cook.

If God wanted me to be a size eight, would he have made Birds Eye Potato Waffles so waffly versatile? Or toastable in the toaster?

By the 90s, we'd got sniffy about sending infants over two lanes of moving traffic to fetch sliced Hovis. It has, I think, something to do with health and safety. Such errands wound up back in the hands of the adults.

Once, bit-fetching was the job mainly of children. In the 1970s, if I sat too long looking bored, I'd be dispatched to the shop carrying the gas bill with a scribbled note on the back. Yes, I was hoping to lie about watching 'Hong Kong Phooey,' yet here I was again buying a can of Nestle Tip Top and a Heinz steamed pudding.

Some people are cruel and thoughtless, some people are definitely phobic, others are just stymied by the march of time, left behind by words and ways of thinking.

Memes, it turns out, cannot stop the march of time.

The first time I realised that generation X, my crowd, had fully became Uncle or Auntie Disgusting at family gatherings came as I was airing my very old-fashioned attitude to allergies.

Obviously, many will feel that having a cleaner means I can't talk about being working class with a straight face. I would argue that due to a childhood full of risible 80s working-class NHS dentistry, I can't do very much at all with a straight face, especially not eat a Granny Smith apple.

A painful attitude to domestic help is, I think, a fundamental aspect of being working class made good.

One of the aspects of trying to 'have it all' as a modern feminist blowhard is that another woman ends up lint-rollering cat hair off your sofa and harshly judging your slapdash method of Q-tip disposal.

Wednesdays are especially hectic for me, as I have to clean the house for two hours before my cleaner arrives.

I am abundant in crap, yet weirdly amazing, let's-all-make-the-best-of-this half-term memories. Looking back, those family holidays were really just a chance to take the mick out of each other, pointing out each other's shortcomings, in the same old manner, in a fresh and uncharted setting.

I love our perfectly imperfect Dent Christmas. We've honed how this day works for decades, so why spoil a winning formula?

Working-class people are pile-driven from birth with the notion 'Money will not make you happy,' but this is balderdash purported mainly to stop them asking for it.

It's not just roast meat and spuds on a plate, like any other Sunday. It may look just like it, give or take a blob of cranberry, but Christmas dinner is imbued with memories. Oh, and hopes, dreams, love and loss, too. All the good, emotionally churning stuff that pairs well with a glass of brandy.

Christmas dinner, when you're the one cooking it, is an oddly spiritual gesture.

Pret was a thing I did almost subliminally, often mainly for a few minutes of downtime, sat quietly alone in the middle of dozens of strangers, sharing tiny tables, breathing each others' recycled air and scrolling mindlessly through our phones.

During the second world war, my grandad was away for the best part of six years.

When I was young enough to work at the Guardian Guide, we once covered our go-to TV dinners; my love of cheap tinned soup with marge-slathered Ryvita and mini pickled onions was shameful to admit.

What we eat at home, behind closed doors, is personal. Our secret snacky peccadilloes do not bear scrutiny.

I love being shown evidence of a rule-flouter, because it makes me feel ever so righteous and holy.

I love the Tower of London, but it is not a feel-good day out - unlike time spent eating beef biang biang or slurping a bean thread noodle and seaweed soup.

Everybody you meet, when you're a restaurant critic, tells you they'd love to be your dinner companion.

I gave up eating outdoors in London in the 1990s, when it became impossible to eat at an outside table without a small gang of buskers turning up to play a rousing chorus of 'La Bamba' on their accordions while you waved off hornets with the menu.

Some foodie types are snobbish about the microwave; I see it as a loyal friend who has had my back for over 30 years.

Before Covid-19, my job was to put on shoes and pants and leave the sofa so you didn't have to.

Microwaving cooks food from the inside out, so you can say goodbye to spongy aubergines and hello to beautifully soft flesh that soaks up the marinade as it cooks.

I've a long running theory that almost every human emotion, social situation and dilemma has been covered at one stage in the 90s sitcom 'Friends.'

I speak for large swathes of the Great British Antisocial Public who just want to be left alone.

I already give cash to good causes at least once a week via the plethora of my friends' mid-life crises masquerading as 'charity work' - treks, cycle rides and marathons.

The most enlightened types by 2050, I think, will be humans who can flip between constant media stimulation and digital detox without clinging and craving.

It's often struck me that social media is full of lonely, sad people doing a brilliant job of sounding OK and perfectly fine people hoovering up everyone's attention via faking being sad.

My freezer always has veggie burgers in it. I don't think you should eat them every day, but they're really handy.

Whenever I talk about loving vegan food, it starts a backlash. The vegans aren't happy with me because I'm not fully vegan and the meat eaters say I'm trying to destroy the farming industry. Any nuance seems to get lost.

I skip breakfast a lot - often, it's just a litre of coffee with oat milk - and I eat lots of protein at lunch, eggs in any form, a block of tofu I'll have marinated and baked, lots of nuts and dried fruit. And I roast loads of vegetables: broccoli is a favourite.

I've realised that, from your mid-40s, everything you eat and drink shows in your face.

In 2017, I did the Christmas big shop on 23 December. Six people, eating for four days, done in under 55 minutes, with two trolleys, in an almost-closing Sainsbury's in Penrith.

I am from a Church of England background, with tales of Mary, Joseph, stars and swaddling clothes imprinted on my psyche. But still, for me, Christmas is primarily marked by a series of tasty traditions.

Whatever late December means to you, it should be a time of twinkly lights, nourishing love and minor indigestion.

People say that the modern Christmas focuses too much on food instead of, like in olden times, the little Baby Jesus. Piffle.

No one should suffer my pastry.

I eat food from all over the world for my job as a restaurant critic, so I often find myself craving a plain Barnsley lamb chop or fish and chips, as I'm so sick of sashimi.

I love very simple, light cocktails like a Twinkle - champagne, vodka and elderflower. I'm also a fan of the New Fashioned - it's a whisky cocktail with rosemary, peach bitters and ginger ale.

My plan, for several years, has been to simply let one year merge into the other, without fanfare, so that the Grim Reaper won't notice me and move me closer to my exit interview.

If I desire something badly enough, I'll buy it for myself; and this thing will never be a Yankee Candle gift set or a book bought beside a shop till that delivers 'The Tao Of Pooh.'

I don't like birthdays. Never have done. Not when I was little and it involved the wild decadence of a Wimpy Brown Derby doughnut with chocolate drizzle, and even less so as I grew older.

I would give my back tooth - the one with the silver filling - to eat afternoon tea with my mother.

Silver linings have been fairly thin on the ground during Covid-19, but the right to wear elasticated-waist nightwear in daytime - livening it up with a jaunty scarf during Zoom calls to fool colleagues that you're dressed - well, at least there was that.

All friendship groups divide into two halves: moody ex-goths who don't mind summer lunch indoors while sipping ice-cold pastis with damp backs-of-knees; and those Club Tropicana types who call ahead to jostle for the one terrace table that's in direct sunlight and from which you'll be lucky to leave with any skin left on your shoulders.

The simple reason buffets light up a room is this: you are providing guests with a tiny dopamine shot from a point in life they were happiest; running into a brilliant birthday party aged five; their granny's Boxing Day open house; the best Eid get-together of their teen years.