A Bulletin for St. Martin's Day

It is growing very November-y, as cold seeps in through the windows, the leaves remaining on the oak trees grow brown, and a chilly, hazy mist descends whenever the sun is not shining through the clouds.

Today it was St. Martin's Day, and we had an anti-coronavirus-measure-friendly celebration:

Mama had prepared goulasch soup, and then cut leafy lettuce and radicchio into fine strips for a salad and made a vinaigrette to go with it. In the living room, we had bowls and dishes of faded-green-and-red Boskop apples, colourful oranges and clementines and mandarin oranges, peanuts and hazelnuts in the shell, Pfeffernüsse and Marzipankartoffeln, Lebkuchenherzen and Spekulatius. It was really nice even to work in the living room earlier in the day, with the cinnamon fragrance of the Spekulatius making the atmosphere very warm and homey. Then J. stood at the stove and patiently prepared 2 kilos of flour's worth of Pöfferkes, and sprinkled icing sugar over them when they had finished deep-frying.

Then T. visited us in the early evening. When T. had cycled home again with a small supply of leftover Pöfferkes, and we were just finishing watching the Tagesschau evening news, uncle M. arrived.

I'm afraid I've eaten so much that it's wiser to put off the customary half-hour of evening exercise — which is fortunately happening more often again, as the work schedule has unexpectedly relaxed this week — for another day.

***

"Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" (1875)
by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
via Wikimedia Commons
currently part of a special exhibition on Belgian symbolist painters
in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin