Professor Brian Cox, Meghan Trainor and Gemma Arterton

From the Reverend Richard Coles:

What a lot I’m learning, bubbling with a northerner.

My brother-in-law, Mark, who lives in Chorley, sometimes works near here, and stays at the Vicarage, where I would otherwise be on my own. I learned a lot from living with another northerner, his brother David, but he moved south, and, according to Mark, acquired soft southern ways. You could have fooled me. I thought he was as northern as Toyah Battersby and the M62; he talked to everyone on the bus, crashed the National Grid with his Christmas lights, would have had gravy on a satsuma. 

I think Mark meant he was more likely to knit mittens from organic alpaca than strip a compressor with his teeth. David wasn’t exactly practical, unlike his brother, who’s only here five minutes and he’s rewiring the guest room, or chain-sawing logs.

One thing they had in common was a love of tater ‘ash. I thought it was a kind of cheese from the Haute Savoie. Not so, it is a classic of Lancastrian cuisine, mince cooked with chunky spuds and carrots, topped with a suet crust. It’s served with brown sauce, and pickled red cabbage. “Ooh cavolo nero?” I said, when Mark made it the other night.

It was delicious, even better on the second day, but by then it had ignited a controversy, for there are as many versions of tater ‘ash, I discovered, as there are petals in a red rose. it’s called different things in different places, some say it should come without a crust, others it should be beetroot not cabbage... even as I speak I can imagine the BBC switchboard lighting up like Blackpool’s Illuminations.

On this all agree: it’s comfort food. What could be more comforting than mince and potatoes, or more thrifty and filling, when times are hard?

And it’s comfort not only for the body, but the soul also. It was David’s forty-fourth birthday yesterday, but he died a week after his forty-third, so this is a tough time. In Grief Awareness Week lots of us bereaved have been sharing our stories, stories like this, not only about loss, but about care and comfort, and light in darkness.

David and I, divided by so many things, were united in a shared belief; that in the bleak midwinter, to the world’s surprise, angels suddenly sang a new song, and new light glowed in a stable at Bethlehem, inextinguishable. May it shine for you.