The Ritual of Bones

I have a pile of bones in my freezer, just a small one right now but it will grow. Winter comes like a seizure in Scotland; first the mellow summer starts to chill, then the morning air starts to smell of wet rot, and all of a sudden some of the nights and dawns are shockingly cold. Biting cold. It passes over and heat seeps back in. Then it comes again; fits of cold... And when the grass crunches underfoot every morning for a week and the sun doesn't rise until I'm on the bus to work I know its time to collect bones.

Chicken bones - don't worry.

Making the Christmas gravy is no small feat if you're a sauce snob like me; Bisto is a good thickener, but I wouldn't just add water and feed it to my family. Not on Christmas... so I begin the careful collection of the best thigh and leg bones I can. I save them from roasts and lunches and snacks and I put them safely in the freezer along with the heads of onions and the asses of carrots. I tell you, its a bloody business.

And unlike most things, its eternal.

There are some people some things that we believe, long after we become adults, will always be there with a kind of childish certainty... and they're usually the ones that leave too soon and take all the little rituals we built around them with them.

Humans are social creatures who thrive on patterns... for the last twelve years the pattern of my winter has gone as such; first I put away my dresses, then I bring out my heavy coats, then I bring out and wash the dogs jackets. Only when all that has happened do I start to collect the bones and heads of the chickens and carrots... and soon after that I pretty myself up and I go shopping with Aunty Jean (Great Aunt Jean, technically, but she's infamously twenty one years of age so that can't be true). We scour charity shops for unusual, pretty things and joke about fur coats and tiaras and then get a lunch. One starter, one main, one dessert, splitting it all down the middle because she can't eat a lot but wants a little of everything... and I'd give her half of anything. I can always eat again when we get home.

A gentle pattern, a song that, this year, is missing some notes. One dog coat hangs to dry, and the handbag I use when I go out with Aunty Jean hasn't moved in months... but the bones are still beginning their annual gathering in the freezer.

***

If you want to make a good Christmas gravy (and by that I arrogantly mean if you want to feel like you're eating at my table), you need at least four chicken carcasses. Don't clean the meat and skin off. Don't scrape the jellied juices from the roast after its gone cold - let them percolate and strain them off at the last moment. Save the whole bloody thing in a freezer bag, let it weigh on your soul. Do it four times and save the heads of your onions and the butts of your carrots and leeks. Let the bones swamp your freezer.

When Christmas comes this year the one dog coat will join its fallen sibling and be replaced with a new one, the handbags fate will have been decided; to hang on the arm or grace the charity shop shelves? That is the question. When Christmas comes I'll pick apart the bones of the year and dump them in a huge pot. I can't stress how huge this pot is. Its a bath, almost... and when the bones are piled in there with their vegetable bodyguards I'll add not enough garlic and too much salt and a pirates bounty of pepper with bunches of mixed herbs and drown it all, finishing the crime in cold blood before I turn up the heat... and after it boils I'll add the turkey neck and giblets.

Love is murder if you do it for long enough, and food is how I show love. One less mouth at the table, one less gift under the tree, but some things don't end, and dinner needs to be made.

***

The big rituals of our lives seem immutable, indelible, but like our actual lives they are a collection of smaller things. A hundred tiny fibres weave together to make a single thread and time cuts some away, leaving the finished piece tatty and worn and so full of things dead and living that it becomes a mirror of Frankenstein's monster.

I might get another dog, hang two coats again, but they won't be the same, and I can go through the shops and have a small lunch alone, or find someone else to go with. I can recreate the rituals step by step... but I'll have to bring the bones of what came before along with me and pile them in the pot.

Isn't it funny that we spend our lives connecting, that we build these rituals and patterns with other people, other creatures, but in the end its the solitary ones that stay... the single fibres that connect their cut companions to the next thread and the next and on in aeternum... or for as long as life, or even a few if we have people to pass it down to.

Social creatures, our lives curled around others, built on communal rituals, we endure break after break, missed note after missed note... all so we can carry the bones forward with us. Isn't that strange? Isn't it beautiful?

Though it begs a final question; is the gravy haunted, or just me?