Christmas Dinner Soup, free of meat (and gloop)

We're now three weeks into 2023, but while the year is no longer really new, I feel it's still just about ok to tell you about a few things I ate over the festive period. Compared to my last post, talking about the Queen's Jubilee some 7 months after it happened, this is almost instantaneous reportage.

Regular readers may recall that in December 2021, I was 'lucky' enough to get my hands on a limited edition tin of Christmas Dinner Big Soup from Heinz, which brought together all your favourite bits of the traditional feast in a sea of gravy. To say I wasn't massively impressed by it would be a bit of an understatement, so when Heinz announced that they would be bringing it back in 2022, I wasn't all that fussed. Well, that's not quite true - I was slightly miffed actually, as this time they were going to be selling it selected branches of Asda, rather than only via their own website, which had meant you had no choice but to pay the postage cost, pushing the price up to around an extortionate £5 (though from memory it did include a donation to a homeless charity, so I musn't grumble.)

The other big change for 2022 was that Heinz also brought out a vegan version, but again I wasn't massively bothered - I am many things, but a vegan is not one of them. One day in late November however, I just so happened to find myself in a large Asda, where they had a good number of tins of the stuff (contrary to reports I'd heard that they were very hard to find anywhere), so I thought I might as well give it a try, as something to write about for a Christmas-themed post, if nothing else. And as I'm writing that post very late, I'm killing two birds with one stone, as this will do for Veganuary too. 

Jubilant Oranges and Lemons

After a flurry of posts in December 2021, I well and truly failed in 2022. I managed just the one post at the start of the year, then a whole 12 months passed by, and now 2023 is here. Was I so ridiculously busy that I didn't have a spare moment to put pen to paper, or finger to key? No, of course not. I am just useless, and achieved very little all round last year. By contrast, in the real world, a great deal happened. Here in the UK we had four Chancellors, three prime ministers, two monarchs and an Accidental Partridge in a pair of shorts in the "I'm A Celebrity" jungle. 

In my defence, I did manage a couple of half-written posts, but got no further with them than that. I took advantage of the extra Bank Holiday given to us for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and made a decent stab at a post related to the celebrations, but I didn't finish it, the summer flew by, and then after her death in September, it felt like I might have missed the boat. Just goes to show, you should always strike while the iron is hot.

But with more time having now passed, it feels a little less weird to be returning to the subject of that post, so I hope it will not be felt inappropriate to anyone. Given that I'm writing this the week that Prince Harry's autobiography comes out, I think fans of the Royal Family will have enough to get upset about anyway.