Odes to ashberry vodka

Christmas in Amersham = Christmas on the outskirts of Moscow in all but location. A lot of our Russian friends (including us) have this constant battle of wanting to stick as rigidly to the customs and traditions they knew back in Russia while sliding slowly, inevitably into Britishness. (Not that 'sliding' implies it's like a downward spiral or anything.) So there are these phases each family is going through, ranging from the "We've just moved here, WTF is shepherd's pie?" phase of headscarves, sticking carpets to walls and coming to dinner parties armed with salads and jars of gherkins, right through to the "Our kids don't speak Russian and we shall lament this fact once a year by gathering together to drink vodka and sing weepy songs about the-good-old-days-of-Novgorod" phase. (My family is at the latter end of the spectrum: Mum has recently been saying, to the horror of my dad, that we should just stop celebrating Russian Christmas on the 7th January altogether because there's no point and we don't go to church anyway.)

It also means that Christmas dinner is usually an indecisive mix of British and Russian - a huge table of twenty million zakuski and rivers of vodka with a turkey tacked onto the end. Yesterday was alright - uneventful, and bearable. I discovered the glorious delights of ashberry vodka, a sweet-ish vodka made with ashberries which sadly can't be found anywhere in the UK. It is good. It is lethally good. I could actually write odes to it, but I'll spare you.

Today I went for a long long walk to try and combat the feeling that my innards were lined with lard. Was deep in thought (one of those trances where you barely realise where you're going and it's only when you come out that you see what the time is and where you are and start getting paranoid that you might have been talking aloud to yourself all this time). Ended up getting lost in the shitty backwaters of town, surrounded by sleepy bungalows and wondering if I'd walked into hell by accident.

I can't seem to end this rather useless post. END.