St Andrew's day – Kathleen Jowitt

Sliced carrots, which instead of being the usual orange are a deep purple colour. Some have a lighter ring around the core

We got purple carrots in the veg box this week. If I told you I’d been saving them for Advent I’d be lying: in fact I fancied leek and potato soup on Monday, had a really busy day on Wednesday so just defrosted some tomato sauce and cooked some pasta, thought the broccoli was probably more urgent on Friday, and didn’t cook on the other days. So in fact it’s worked out very appropriately with these magnificent carrots arrayed in deep purple for the solemn season of Advent. Some of them even have stars in the middle, as you see, although these didn’t look as striking after cooking.

It’s St Andrew’s day as well, of course. I did think about that (very slightly) in advance, and cooked a bought salmon en croûte in his honour, and thought of my last church, dedicated, like many others in Cambridge, to the first fisherman-apostle. But it’s been a wearing day at the end of a wearing month, and I don’t quite feel as if I’ve properly got started on Advent yet, or given St Andrew the attention he deserves. Plenty more of Advent to come, of course. St Andrew might have to wait for next year.

A transparent plastic bauble containing a photograph of a paddle steamer, with some snowstorm material

It’s St Andrew’s day, so it seemed appropriate to share the most authentically Scottish decoration in my possession. (Plus, this one is robust enough to be floating around the Christmas boxes without wrapping, and it’s a long time until we actually put a tree up.)

This bauble depicts the paddle steamer Waverley under way in a body of water that I can’t identify. It came in a hamper of Waverley goodies which was a present from my father a couple of years back. There was a tin of shortbread. I now use the tin for storing herbal teabags. There was a tube of biscuits. I now use the tube for storing pencils. There were probably other things with less durable packaging. And there was this bauble.

As a family, we’re very fond of the Waverley. (My great-grandparents were shipwrecked on their honeymoon when the paddle steamer Empress struck a pier at Calais. They survived the experience, as perhaps may be inferred from my existence. It hasn’t bothered later generations.) We’ve gone round the Isle of Wight and along the Dorset coast on her. You can go down and watch the engines pumping and pumping, and the smell is just glorious. I’ve dashed across London to see her steaming up the Thames under Tower Bridge. There’s something immensely moving (pun not intended) about this grand old ship still doing the thing she was built to do, seventy years on. Something that was built to serve, still serving.