8 December 2004
I love Christmas Pudding. I love it a lot.
A friend was telling me about flying home for Christmas. Every year, she said, there were appalling delays around the x-ray machines. Why? Because every second person was carrying a Christmas pudding, and every single one of those people had to be investigated, because it looked like they were carrying an enormous package of semtex in their bag.
Of course, I made that story up, but I'm sure in some sense it could happen. And would surely be justified, because frankly, christmas pudding and semtex have a lot in common. From weight, density, maleability, surface tension, preparation time, how good they both taste with brandy butter, portability, surely the only difference between them is the level of explodidity (semtex is slightly more explody).
I'm only guessing on the preparation time, of course, I've never actually 'made' semtex. I only remember that in our house, we used to begin making it what seemed like a more than a decade before Christmas, every single year, on a day that my mother christened 'Stir-up Sunday'.
We would get excited, because my mother was taking out all the Christmas-looking ingredients. Suddenly, it was as if Christmas was in the air - like Santa himself had farted. If the Christmas ingredients were out of the cupboard, it must almost be Christmas!
No. All a cruel joke. The traditional way to make a Christmas pudding, you see, is to stir it one direction a fixed number of times, the in the opposite direction a fixed number of times (it's a luck thing - you have to do it, otherwise your head falls off) and them tie it in a little muslin bag and leave it somewhere dark to think about what it has done until Christmas.
So mixey, mixey, mix, we would go - and then yexim, yexim, xim - and all of a sudden, as soon as the promise of Christmas had arrived, it was gone again. The pudding had to go and live in a cupboard, or the attic, or next door, or something, to ferment mysteriously or the months (or perhaps years) before December 25.
And then it appears, after the largest dinner you've eaten in your life, you're presented with a steamed fruit punchline. Surely this was never meant as a serious proposition - the heaviest food in the world, served for dessert after a main course composed of the next 67 heaviest foods. Then you slather it in alcohol, booby trap it with small pieces of metal, set fire to it, and Bob's your uncle - delicious Christmas pudding for all the family.
I well realise that to any non-British reader, the process may sound like gastrocide.
And, admittedly, this may well be a long running terrorist plot. It's brilliant in its simplicity: "We have developed the ulimate stealth dessert! A ha ha ha ha ha! We will FEED them teeel they burst! If this does not work, we will choke them with the small coins that we will tell them they MUST put in for 'luck', and if this does not work, we will set FIRE to the infadels, with their own cooking brandy! And if still this does not work, we will reveal to them that while they were not looking, we replaced their pudding with semtex! And then they will blow up! A ha ha ha ha ha!"
I don't care. If I'm ever going to be blown up, I want it to be with a spoonful of Christmas pudding in my hand. Pass the brandy butter.