Sinterklaas

The feast of St Nicholas has rolled round again. We come at it from the Dutch angle, with pancakes, bowls of snert (thick pea and ham soup that you can almost slice) and Dutch songs about Sinterklaas from an old CD we were sent by Hanna's sister Katy who lives in Amsterdam. If you want to know the background, there's a great St Nicholas website that you can visit at http://www.stnicholascenter.org/ which has masses of information and some good children's activities and stories. On YouTube there are videos of St Nicholas arriving in Holland by boat.

I like the international content of the story, starting from his home in Turkey to Spain and then to Holland, and subsequently to Scandinavia, Russia and the wider world beyond. It may be a little politically incorrect to have people blacked-up wearing wigs to play the part of Zwarte Piet who is St Nick's naughty Moorish helper, but no more so than using small people to make toys in the workshop up in Lapland.

Where better to celebrate than Mill Road in Cambridge, which must be just about the most culturally diverse street in the UK. The road has its own festival at the start of December and most of the shops and cafes put on a special show. There are stalls on the green and entertainers on the pavement. If, like us, you rejoice in the fact that we live in a world of different cultures, religions and cuisines, get on down there next year.

Our visit started at the City end of the street, near Parkside Pool, with a performance by a saxophone quartet. They played most of Hanna's favourite classical pieces and so we enjoyed their performance for perhaps 15 minutes before moving on to the shops. "Sally Anne's" is the big Salvation Army shop. It's normally a bit of a rummage in there, and often they don't have much stock, but this year they really pulled out the stops with window displays and organised stalls inside. It would have taken me almost two hours just to thumb through their 12" LP collection. We bought some videos for Dan.

There are quite a few charity shops in Mill Road, but many more cafes, ranging from grungy English ones to Chinese, Indian, North African and Turkish. At least four of these double as Internet cafes, some with old sofas and mountains of books. One sports a window full of hookah pipes. We didn't have time to sit down to a meal this time, so we snacked our way around until we reached the Korean Deli. Every year I watch the ladies filling seaweed rolls, but the queue outside always put me off shopping. This year we sent Hanna in and she bought some sushi and some dumplings: They were lovely.

For our St Nicholas feast, we stocked up on almond and cinnamon biscuits from one of several international supermarkets and then headed home to put out our shoes by the fire. We had savoury Flemish pancakes for tea, but I can't tell you how the snert worked out: It's still cooking.