Fat chance!

[RED-DOG]

I was watching a documentary about obesity in children the other night and I realised just how lucky I was that during my childhood, calories had not been invented. If they had, I would have been enormous.

It's not that we had an endless supply of food, when we were kids there was no such thing as "What would you like for your tea?" or "How many slices of toast do you want?" Given the option, we would have eaten the entire loaf and spread half a pound of butter on it, it's just that the stuff we did eat would have been crammed with calories if they had been around back then.

I can remember my mam going into the butchers for a five bob fry up. (These were proper blood and sawdust butchers with a shed out back where they killed a pig or a beast every now and then) The butcher would pile up about half a stone of fatty odds and ends that he had collected while trimming the joints, to these he would add a few links of burst or misshapen sausage, some bristly skin that used to be attached to the bacon, and any other bits of spare porcine or bovine anatomy, the exact biological description of which we were happy to be vague about. Once he had it all assembled on the marble counter, it looked like some sort of horrific road accident. My mam would insist that he wrap it in reams of paper so that it wouldn't leak into her bag.

When we arrived home with our booty, usually after a walk of a mile or two from the shops to the lane that we were stopping in, mam would set to and cook the fry-up straight away. This made good sense because we had no fridge or freezer, and we were all ravenous anyway. She used to put an absolutely enormous frying pan on to the gas ring and then drop in half a pound of lard, when it was hot she would add the meat, which gave off the most unimaginably tantalising smell as it frizzled and spit. While the meat was cooking she would cut crusty bread into slices about 4 inches thick, then we children were given two slices each to hold as we waited. We salivated so much, Pavlov would have been proud.

Eventually, the frying process would be complete and we would be almost dead with anticipation. We would line up, smallest first, and hold out one slice of bread. This would be piled high with as much assorted fried meat as possible, then the other slice would be dipped into the pan to soak up a large amount of meat juice and melted lard before becoming the top half of a sandwich that was by now, almost too heavy for a small boy to hold.   

Most of our meals would have contained millions of calories if they had been invented, but we didn't know anything about nutrition, we used to eat as much as possible, and then work and run and play until the next meal time. I was so thin that if I took off my shirt, one of the elders from another family would quip "Quick son, tell your mam to feed you up before the cruelty man takes you away"

Happy days!

[Robert HM]

Darn you!

I've just had my dinner and now I am hungry again.

[matt674]

calories had been invented but most of us used to just burn them off by running around in the playground from 8am to 9am (now they have pre-school where they sit in class rooms and read). We used to have 15 mins break in the morning, 1 hour for lunch and then another 15 minutes in the afternoon all spent running round like it was going out of fashion.

Then in the evening it was meeting up with all your friends you'd spent the morning running round with and playing hide and seek, british bulldog, tickey it or even just plain old football on the field (now its playstations and gameboys, and fields no longer exist)

[boldie]

drrooooooooooooooool....a fry up in proper lard..now that's real food!

[AndrewT]

Kev's been doing so well on the diet recently - do you want him to fall off the wagon?

[byronkincaid]

There used to be a large park behind our house and I was allowed out to play with my friends from around 6 years old. No way does anyone let a 6 year old do that anymore. WTF changed?

[Robert HM]

A friend came back from Wales recently, had bought half a pig, jointed, from the local butcher. It included half a head which he was going to throw out. Enter Robert and next day a large amount of brawn, proper jelliefied.

[RED-DOG]

I've always thought Arthur was a great name for a pig.

[RED-DOG]

Remote farms used to leave their milk in aluminium churns at the end of the lane, ready for the milk lorry to collect. I would sneak up, quietly remove the lid and use a cut stem of cow-parsley as a straw to guzzle a few pints of fresh cream from the top.....mmmmmm...calorific! 

(A cow parsley stem makes a peashooter sized tube, we used to use it for that too, with hawthorn berries for peas)

[Tonji]

We would line up, smallest first,

We had the same procedure. As the eldest I was always last, my two younger brothers always got in first. Today one is 6 foot 5, the other 6, 2. I am 5, 10. LOL

[Dingdell]

As a cost saving exercise when I was eight or nine my Dad got a freezer and once it was working properly bought a pig and laid it out (dead) on our kitchen floor.  I have no idea how he got hold of it.

He and his friend then cut it open - it seemed to have escaped their thought process that this pig would be full of blood/organs etc. It all went everywhere, a tsunami of blood that went into every crevice of our newly layed white and brown lino floor as well as (we found out later when the smell started) soaking into the mdf of our kitchen cupboards.

My mother was frantically (and ineptly) throwing down tea towels on the pig trying to stem the blood flow but to stop the blood reaching the hallway, and our beige carpet, my Dad ended up laying on the floor like a sandbag just in front of the doorway with his shirt soaking up the blood.

Anyone looking through the window would have thought it was a masacre.

Our kitchen floor was forever bloodstained, no amount of scrubbing from my mother could completely rid it of the claret stains.

The cost saving exercise also backfired, I refused to eat a pig I had seen slaughtered on our kitchen floor and the excess of pig meant everyone was sick and tired of pork long before we'd emptied the freezer.

[crapper]

Ah, those were the days....we used to live on fish poached in milk about 3 days a week ( particularly flounders ) that my dad and his brother used to catch in their little wooden rowboat. Then there was rabbit, which my dad and one of his workmates used to catch by putting out snares in the woods in which the Decca record-pressing factory that he worked in was located. The other couple of days would consist of ox-heart stew ( plenty of pearl barley ) and our family's all-time favourite steak & kidney pudding ( wrapped in a cloth and steamed for many hours ), using the juices that leaked from the cloth for a delicious clear gravy. Spam fritters or toad-in-the hole were other weekend treats too, with large home-cut chips.

Our favourite breakfast fare in those days was bread or toast with beef or pork dripping on, with just a sprinkle of salt added. It makes me salivate just thinking about it now.

At weekends we would disappear over the fields for the day with some homemade plum jam sandwiches and a bottle of diluted squash and stay out 'til teatime.

Times have certainly changed..... as I was telling my 12 year old son just yesterday, as he sat for hours playing his Nintendo DS hooked up to the wireless internet connection, battling with some kid from Canada!

Nice post Tom......it's good to reminisce !

[RED-DOG]

OMG! I just love Ding's pig story,. It's like readers wives, so horrible it must be true.





Crapper, how are you mate?. You should post more often, you have a wonderful way with words.

PS- It looks like our mothers went to the same finishing school.

[Maddog]

I'm really hungry now, that fry up sounds fantastic and so does that Steak and Kidney pudding

 

[ericstoner]

On my paper round when i was 13 years old, I used to pass a grocers which had a delivery of c.ream cakes everyday  just before 7 am. I  stole one most days to enjoy on my way round.

Then near the end of my round, a shop kept its supplies in an outhouse behind the shop this had an old tarporlin roof, i could put my arm through a gap and reach the R White's lemonade. that made a tasty breakfest most days.