Ballooning Buttucks

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My Great Auntie Phoebe was great in every sense of the word. As a former cook to a Great House she specialised in recipes demanding dollops of lard, butter and dripping. She presided over steaming cauldrons of glutinous soups and great steaming thick crusty tarts that were skilfully lifted from great black ovens.

The members of this once Great House are all now of course deceased; no doubt their deaths were due to high levels of cholesterol, furred up coronary arteries and bilious attacks; and the Great House is reduced to a shadow of its former glory as a venue to be hired for corporate events.

As a child Auntie Phoebe’s biscuit tin was a delight. It was full to the brink of delicious mouth watering biscuits. She gloried in the extra wide cups she presented us with, in which an ocean of tea could be poured. Dunked biscuits that fell to pieces would be lost for days in these swamps of tea, surfacing like weird fascinating crocodiles with strangely rigged soggy backs. Auntie Phoebe discovered our weakness for Kit Kits and her walk-in larder was never ever short of them.

Auntie Phoebe long ago joined fellow smokers puffing away outside Heaven’s Gate. Her white curly hair is no doubt still stained yellow at the front from her smoking habit and her fingers will still have their yellowy-brown nicotine stain. I hope that the cloud she is standing on has been reinforced to cope with her ethereal mass as she makes new clouds.

I took warning from Great Auntie Phoebe I don’t use lard or dripping when I cook. As a vegetarian it’s olive oil that I use. I’ve munched this year on nasturtiums and home ground lettuce leaves and cress. I’ve swum, done yoga, cycled for miles, walked for miles, gardened, walked to train stations, and rarely touched a Kit Kat or a biscuit.

And yet despite all this, I am ballooning! Trousers bought only two weeks ago do not fit. I am reduced to just one pair. I fear that dear Great Auntie Phoebe has passed onto me the inheritance treasured by all the Great Cooks who once worked in the Great Houses of England. A gift that was a mark of their skill and prowess…

…the gift of ballooning buttocks!