HERE’S one of life’s little joys: you finish your dinner and are just thinking about putting a brew on when you remember – yay, yay and thrice yay, I bought ice cream today!
Tell you what: there’s nothing like a bit of pudding for raising the morale. I believe, too, that in getting the old salivary juices going, it helps the stomach digest the main course. It also takes away the taste of the latter which, with my cooking, is rarely pleasant.
Of course, we’re not supposed to have pudding now. It’s too unhealthily pleasurable. What I don’t understand is how people in the past were nearly all slim, yet they ate pudding with lunch and dinner. No meal was complete without it.
When we were bairns, the only reason for eating our main course – perhaps some horrible sliced meat – was to get to the pudding: in those days, often as not, tinned fruit and custard. My favourite, though, was stodgy sponge pudding and custard.
Ooh, it was so warm and cosy! And it filled up all the corners, meaning you didn’t need anything else that evening. People forgoing pudding now often have something around 9pm, so it all works out equally in the end.
Actually, to be honest, we’d have pudding with dinner and something else around 9pm: “breakfast” cereal or toast. We knew how to eat in those days and yet never got fat.
Strictly speaking, ice cream is a probably a dessert rather than a pudding, but I care not a whit. I remember a girl in our old works canteen, who was as thin as a rake and used to have sponge pudding, custard and ice cream for her “afters”.
Recently, it’s just been ice cream for me. You can get all sorts nowadays, including non-dairy, though I tend to go for a straightforward choc ice.
One day last week, I’d such a happy time, topped off with ice cream. Friends were visiting from Glasgow. We went to the village pub, all socially distanced and being admitted only after having our heads examined (for temperature), and had such a laugh, mainly recalling jokes and characters from cartoons, which we all (three chaps and a lady) loved.
Laughing like a drain
When I got home, I put on my dinner and looked for a DVD to watch, opting for The Royle Family, which I’ve seen so many times but which, once again, made me laugh like a drain.
I’d had a day of laughing – and then I remembered about the ice cream. That really topped things off. I remember thinking: ‘Life doesn’t get much better than this.’
Of course, I don’t have ice cream all the time, usually undergoing a period of abstinence after one of those unfortunate occasions when I’ve eaten the whole packet in one go.
But that just means you can’t take it for granted. It’s something of a special treat, and probably needs a few days of going without, and thinking ‘Oh, how rotten – there’s no ice cream’, for you to appreciate the joy of a choc ice to put the tin lid on your dinner.
It’s 11:35 am as I write. There’s a choc ice in the freezer. I’m tempted to have it noo. But I’ll keep it for tonight – my little post-prandial delight.
