“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.” ― Samuel Pepys

Pre-dinner drinks followed by a meal at the Pack Horse, Hayfield.  The revamped modern pub / restaurant interior is comfortably.  The new management have successfully retained a rural country charm without resorting to chintzy clichés, making it an instantly relaxing venue.   

The Pack Horse, Hayfield, High Peak

Three generations ate, drank and made merry away from iPhones, iPads, tweets, Facebook pokes and WhatsApp updates.  The younger generation formed entire, coherent sentences, using words of more than one syllable.  With the conversation flowing as easily as the Prosecco, the late afternoon Boxing Day banquet proved to be a festive phenomenon.

It is funny how, as naive new parents, we thought that making it past the toddler stage would see us returned to the fine dining scene.  How wrong we were.  We had not factored in the bigger they got the more expensive their toys would become, squeezing our disposable income down to nought. 

We had not anticipated cancelled evenings out due to an offspring's bad hair or spots either.  You would have thought the child concerned was suffering from Yersinia Pestis bacterium or else had the kind of deformities usually only associate with Proteus syndrome, given the volume of protests.  Moreover, if by some miracle we did manage to herd all three out of the door, the evening was often cut short due to ceaseless bickering.  It was our own fault, of cause it was.  We decided to have three children.  We were the ones responsible for the age gaps too.

So how nice it was after twenty-three years to finally have them all there in one place with no long faces, no miserable pouts and no tears.  How lovely it was to witness grandchildren having in-depth conversations with grandparents on three-dimensional tattoos, car theft techniques and a dead dog.  It was definitely a family boxing day to be remembered.