December

As the Christmas and New Year rituals come round again, it is not last January that feels a long way off, but the intervening months of plums and peaches, strawberries and sea trout. TV advertising hits with its annual exhortations to buy the same old ginger wine, frozen breast joints and mass-produced mince-pies. But the real choice of produce is much wider and stranger than at any other time of the year. Producers and wholesalers keep back a massive bulk of choice items for the festive rush, from Stiltons to oysters and smoked salmon, and importers pull out all the stops to make the humblest Corner-shop into an Aladdin’s cave of unseasonal exotica.