We never really did puddings other than the Saturday victoria sponge extravagance, generally once you'd finished chewing your way through one course of my mother's cooking (to this day she thinks a cooking a steak well-done takes 45 minutes in the pan, at which point my father will put in the oven for another fifteen minutes to make sure it's hot) you're not willing to volunteer for round two. I remember Angel Delight mostly because we didn't have an electric whisk which meant I was pressed into service for whisking duties. By the time it was ready, I wasn't. The exception was trifle at Christmas. That was more ceremony than food. Out came the giant bowl, more garden pond that glassware, and with no expense spared, the bottle of QC sherry, or occasionally Harvey's Bristol Cream. An entire bottle would go in, with the little sponge fingers, tins of fruit, Rowntree's jelly, and be left to set for about a week before the layering construction quantities of custard and whipped cream on top. And gloriously, I'd get to snow an entire tub of hundreds and thousands on it. By this point, levering the trifle into the fridge was a job for two adults. As a child, I could have fallen in and been lost. We'd be eating that trifle come Easter. It was a great opportunity as a child to get drunk, the combination of sherry trifle, my granddad sneaking me nips of whisky and ginger beer, my grandma doing the same with her Mackensen's milk stout, let's just say I slept well on Christmas evening. Which, in retrospect, may have been my parent's plan all along. It was perfectly OK to drug your children in the 70s and 80s.
