Pilcher’s Winter Solstice is about a Christmas picnic at which a pair of 60-somethings unexpectedly find love when it’s not expected. It’s heartwarming and sudsy!
After much tribulation, Elfrida Phipps and Oscar Blundell, and friends gather at a Christmas Eve picnic to celebrate Jesus’ birth, the solstice, and the beginning of the celestial new year.
As Pilcher orchestrates it, the picnic is a moveable feast. It begins indoors with burning Yule logs and glasses of wine and then shifts outdoors because it “seemed sacrilegious to be inside.” Eventually, they get to church, and Oscar plays Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” on the organ. A sign that he’s come to terms with his old griefs. Elfrida is delighted and suddenly more in love with him than she realized.
In the house’s lee, the picnickers eat hot soup laced with sherry, ham, and mustard sandwiches made with “fresh rolls,” a bacon-and-egg quiche, chicken drumsticks, tomato salad, green apples, cheddar cheese, potato crisps, and chocolate. How the carafe keeps the coffee “boiling-hot” is a mystery. Elfrida thinks it’s “the best picnic ever.”
For Pilcher devotees, tour the Scottish Highlands for a literary pilgrimage.
See Rosamunde Pilcher. Winter Solstice (2000). London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000. I have not seen Martyn Friend’s Winter Solstice (2003), with William Corlett’s screenplay based on Rosamunde Pilcher’s novel.