London - Santa Cam, the imaginary 24-hour camera I tell the kids is recording all their pre-Christmas crimes, has officially been switched on.
“Your every evil move is now on film, tiny tyrants,” I reiterate firmly over breakfast. “Better be good, or Santa will go through your Christmas list with his red pen.”
Santa Cam has worked for nearly a decade now.
The two older ones may roll their eyes at me during this annual announcement, but Santa Cam is still a better disciplinary tool than Mary Berry’s wooden butter pat for my seven-year-old son and his sister Mabel, two-and-a-half.
I notice Mabel quickly puts her chubby little mitts over her pockets where she’s hiding chocolate Santas pilfered from the Christmas tree earlier.
And even though the two big girls, aged nine and 11, don’t believe in Santa Cam any more, or indeed Santa, they happily play the game. “Great teamwork, girls,” I say after the smaller two have crept out of the kitchen to put the choccie decorations back.
The older sisters’ rare display of sibling solidarity as they give the pretend camera the thumbs up in front of the little ones fills me with cheer.
It’s just a small thing, but it helps keep a family tradition alive, metaphorically tying our bonds tighter as the youngsters grow older and gradually more distant.
“Actually, we’re calling ourselves Team HobNob,” they inform me. The nickname is in honour of our new girl crush, Domestic Goddess Nigella Lawson (who called her supporters Team Cupcake).
“Go Nigella we love you,” Team HobNob (we are big biscuits eaters) yell whenever she’s on telly.
It took me a while to explain why “the chocolate licking fridge lady” (as my son, the connoisseur of baking shows, calls her) is in the news. But now my pre-teen daughters understand the reasons everyone is talking about Nigella.
And they’ve concluded, as I have, that any woman strong enough to walk through the battlefield of desperate grief after her first husband died, before suffering another emotional battering, is a rare heroine in today’s upside down world of questionable female role models.
My daughters neither judge nor criticise anything they have heard about Nigella’s life - it’s so refreshing to listen to them simplify the facts and decide that this woman is a good one.
Children have an over-developed sense of what is fair and what is not, and mine rightly believe that what has happened to Nigella is not fair. They don’t like it.
She has, after all, been part of their life since they were little, her ever-so-simple “put it all in a bowl and cook it quick” cupcake recipe has glued us together as a family on hundreds of rainy Sundays.
Baking those tiny sponges sustained us through many Cornish holidays when dire weather trapped us all inside. So we have a soft spot for Nigella.
The now slightly ragged cook book I was given by a friend has become a symbol of team work for us as a family, loaded as it is with memories of me, the world’s worst cook, making cakes for the first time with each of my toddlers: the cosiest, messiest, happiest act of mother love there ever was.
What a gift she unknowingly gave us, because I’m certain I’ll be making those cakes with my grandchildren.
It’s hard to reconcile our own golden cupcake memories with the sadness of the life of the woman who created them.
How strong she must be, how brave and how courageous to survive such loss and go on to build a business, carve out a career, mother a young family before enduring the “intimate terrorism” of a dysfunctional relationship which so very nearly broke her.
Team HobNob is totally infatuated with Nigella - it has nothing but admiration for her, nothing but praise for the dignified way she has conducted herself in the public eye.
We don’t feel sorry for her, we’re not overwhelmed with sympathy and we never say “poor Nigella”. Instead, we’re blown away by her big heart and fantastic poise (and also her magnificent hair, as my son points out).
Nigella is a lioness among women, a champion among mothers, and we’re proud to give her hero status in this house. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.