Sunday Nerdy Sunday

Roasted

steven harris carves up a wonderful roast for us, with added fox poo...

I am King of Sunday. I was crowned in a clandestine ceremony in 1594 and have been genetically enhanced by roast dinners ever since. Yes, roast dinners. Roast dinners are good for you. They help you to grow wings. They increase your hair drive and add libido into your follicles. Or they don’t do these things at all and I’m insane. Please stop touching my Yorkshire pudding.
Sunday roast. Ooh what a temptation of a phrase. “Would you like Sunday roast?” Why yes, very much so, so much so that I’d be prepared to slaughter an entire village of guppies to satisfy the blood lust of any deranged cook insisting on a sacrifice before they dish up said foodstuffs. Sunday roast is like intercourse only more satisfying. I must have reached a certain age.

At the centre of the meal is a killed bird or beast (unless you are vegetarian, in which case please look the other way). The bird or beast has normally been pre-killed by the kind and gentle folk of the abattoir who are never covered in tattoos and rarely enjoy their job or get off on the stench of blood. All the cookist has to do is shove the creature in a rectangular heating-up device known in the trade as an oven (but I don’t really want to confuse you with technical terms).

While the dead thing heats up in the rectangular heating device the cookist must chop up various vegetables, turn bread into sauce, parboil potatoes (parboiling is when your dad does it for you), put those potatoes in the rectangular heating device so that they go all crispy yum-yum, time when to put the chopped up vegetables over some heat that doesn’t come from inside the rectangular heating device but from a ring of fire on top of it, and make gravy.

Simple eh? God I’m starving now. Sadly this entire process takes about a million hours so when the combined foodstuffs arrive on the table most people forego knives and forks and simply thrust their faces into the plate like pigs scoffing truffles. Or dogs eating fox poo.

Fox poo is no longer part of the traditional Sunday roast. Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, hedgehogs on sticks and little sausages wrapped in slices of bacon can be included if you like. As can vegetarians (who can look back now). A vegetarian tastes lovely, a bit like fried tofu. And they are extra tasty with some cranberry sauce smothered over their buttocks.

And for afters? Pudding? Sweet? Nexts? The sugary course after the roast? Anything you want. Apart from another roast dinner as that would simply count as second helpings, not as a dessert course. Ice cream and bicycles, yoghurt and fish, monkey nuts and chunks of keyhole surgery, or any offhand reference to previous Sunday Nerdy Sunday columns back in the day when it existed in a parallel universe.

After you have filled your bellies with all this scrumptious goodness you must then spend two hours paying obeisance to the King of Sunday. Me. Praise me. Tell me in prayer and incantation form how great I am, how luscious my hair is, how wonderful my shoes are, what a marvellous sense of humour I possess and how compassionate I am not to chop you all up into tiny pieces when I’m having a bad day.

After that, I suppose you could watch Nude Top Gear. It’s not my bag but I am, of course, very enlightened. You could read my book, I suppose. It’s called ‘How To Be As Incredibly Enlightened As The King of Sunday’ and is available in no shops or e-book outlets as it is invisible and ethereal.

Thank you, come again. Please wipe your brain on the way out.

steven harris is on Twitter As @ThePlanetHarris