* click HERE to listen to EPISODE 8 *
After only a couple of days on ebay, our Sainsbury’s Basics Christmas Pudding has already attracted an incredible FOURTEEN BIDS! Thankyou ever so much to everyone who has put in bids already; and everyone else, get bidding. All proceeds of the auction (including the £2 postage fee) go to Comic Relief, and if helping out disadvantaged people in Africa and the UK wasn’t enough to lure out your altruistic monies, you of course get 454g of Christmas pudding all of your very own.
Which, according to some rogue factions, would make it a win-win situation. We’ve had an email from listener Dave, mounting a strident defence of the pudding:
I was mildly disgruntled to hear your bashing of Christmas pudding. I love Christmas Pudding and would argue that Christmas Cake is the real villain. It has disgusting layers of marzipan and icing on top of what is essentially a very dry, cake-shaped, Christmas Pudding. Is Helen aware that Christmas Pudding can be fried as an excellent Boxing Day breakfast?
I was not aware of that; when confronted with a foodstuff that manages to render innocent fruit heavier than lead, my natural instinct is not to fry it. Or eat it for breakfast and condemning myself to a Boxing Day spent having a lie-down, clutching my heart. But, whilst the Zaltzman pudding remnants moulder away unloved and unfried, my brother can habitually be found chomping on Christmas CAKE as his Boxing Day breakfast. Perhaps he and Dave can settle which is the true villain of Christmas with a festive gut-barging contest?
However, I concur with Dave’s point that Christmas Pudding and Christmas Cake are natural enemies; and let’s not forget the Scrappy Doo of sweet Christmas stomach-busters, the mince pie. All three are cut from the same cloth: fruit, sugar, flour and extreme stodginess. And yet, on the day of the year when you’re least likely to suffer hunger pangs, all three awake from their 364-day-long hibernation (because the last person to eat a mince pie in June was sent to the Priory) and mount a three-pronged endurance test for the digestive system. It’s baffling. But perhaps it’s just what Jesus wanted for his birthday.
Anyway, sorry, Dave, to have caused you disgruntlement. Rest assured: as far as I’m concerned, Christmas Pudding AND Christmas Cake can go fuck themselves.
Except for when they’re being used to raise money for good causes, people! Bid like the clappers in our charity auction! Hey, maybe Christmas Pudding will be rehabilitated as a fashionable spring/summer snack, and I’ll look even stupider than I do on the average day.
