We sleep in late, til 8:15, before finally rolling out of bed. We had each opened one gift from each other last night, things to wear to church, the skirt for Dawn and the sweater for me. This morning we make mimosas and have a nice sit by the tree together and open the rest.

We have brunch, our usual weekend breakfast of omelette and toast, but with Dawn’s special cheese grits. And more mimosas.

We take a short walk mid-morning, before it starts raining. When we get back, I start reading a book that Dawn gave me, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar, by Adam Nicolson. I have a fun epiphany reading the preface, where Nicolson describes the British concept of the hero, inherited from ancient Greece (e.g., Homer’s Achilles) and ancient Rome (e.g., Virgil’s Aeneas). He writes,

That twin inheritance, the Virgilian and the Homeric, are both in play at Trafalgar and both are fused there with the contemporary passion for a burning apocalyptic fire.

And, as it happens, after having seen the British Romantic exhibit on Saturday, I spent yesterday morning reading the first few chapters of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake, and this sentence immediately brings Blake to my mind. And apparently to Nicolson’s as well, as the very same paragraph continues:

It is not usually done, either by naval or literary scholars, to put William Blake and Nelson in the same bracket … but to do so, and to understand their shared relationship to the visions and desires of contemporary England, is to understand both why Nelson was the object of so much love and hope in England … and why the men of the fleet he commanded fought and killed with such unbridled intensity and passion.

I think I’m going to really like this book.

Oh, and I should maybe say that I’m also reading it because I’ve run out of Patrick O’Brian books. At least the Aubrey-Maturin series. I finished all twenty. (There’s kind of a twenty-first, called simply 21, but it’s (a) apparently just three chapters written, whereupon O’Brian died, and (b) available only in hardback, and that hard to find as well.) Boy, they were so good. I picked the first one back up and re-started it after finishing the twentieth, and it was a real kick to read and think of all that was going to happen to these same people, to see them all meeting for the first time. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, of course, but also Pullings and Mowett and Killick. Oh, and Lord Keith and Queenie. Great fun.

I make another pie in the afternoon, much more successful than the one I made yesterday. Yesterday I tried mixing the dry ingredients first, but maybe shouldn’t have included brown sugar as a dry ingredient. And then I chilled the ball of dough for about forty minutes before rolling it out. And so anyway yesterday’s pie didn’t seem to be done enough on the inside, even though the crust around the edges was getting ready almost to burn. Today’s pie seems to finish crust and custard both around the same time, what with a less chilled crust and a maybe better mixed custard.

For dinner I chop the obligatory onion and Dawn makes a wonderful mushroom risotto, with sautéed fresh spinach. And we watch the very un-Christmasy Prime Suspect 3.