Linguistic musings, et al

Is it even remotely possible that I like cooking so much, and invite people around to eat so often, because of the inherent opportunities to catastrophise* the evening?

Viz and to wit, tonight is Burns Night Observ'd, and the haggis is boiling in its pot, and there is now nothing I can do for three hours. At that point, we will find out if it's a triumph or disaster (and yes, those are the only two options; anything not the first is by definition the second, haven't you met me?). And the recipe I used last year, which was a triumph, is no longer available on the internet; so this year is kind of a hodge-podge, a bit of this and a bit of that and see how it turns out. Which is my common approach to things I'm comfortable with, oh and books, but this is only my second haggis ever and people are coming and I am far from comfortable, so I was working myself up into a lovely state over the thing.

Only then when I actually mixed everything together - no suet, so I'm doing without suet, it's a low-cal haggis; and herbs, just because I have herbs in the garden if not in the recipe; and total guesswork about proportion-of-oatmeal, because variation in recipes was monstrous; and like that, on and on - it really smelled gorgeous, so. It's kind of hard to see how it could be the catastrophe I none the less envision (unless it expands beyond the capacity of the pudding-basin and bursts out into the water, that's always a possibility). I am trying to tell myself that acquired kitchen-skills will mostly allow most meals to turn out okay, especially this kind of slow low use-up-the-bits cooking, which is the most forgiving of approaches. Not sure I'm actually convincing myself, but hey. I should go and put the potatoes in to bake before mashing...


*Note for the bewildered: "to catastrophise" is a lot like "to apostrophise", except that rather than "O table!" one begins "O bloody hell!"