The Sunday Roast

Sometime in the 60's
I never had much of an appetite as a kid, but for some unknown reason my mother took it into her head that I either wouldn't or couldn't eat roast beef. This was the 60's, and home life didn't get much more traditional, so every Sunday lunch involved a roast, more often than not beef. Cooking in those days was rather less health conscious than it is now, of course, and a roast involved lots of saturated fat. In fact, by the time the joint was cooked, it was positively swimming in fat and the juices were poured off to make a gravy that could fur up arteries at a hundred paces.

A side effect of the cooking process meant that blood from the joint ran out into the extra dripping that the joint was usually covered with, basically frying it in the process. This produced a disgusting collection of greyish globular matter that drifted about on a lake of saturated animal fat. Mother deemed that this was a suitably nutritious alternative to the beef that I apparently wouldn't or couldn't eat, and it was accordingly served to me along with roast potatoes, two veg and Heart Attack Gravy.

It was bitter and had a vile, rubbery texture, but I was regularly told that I preferred it to the beef and so I reluctantly ate it. One Sunday, however, I really wasn't very hungry and didn't want to eat it. But this was the British Middle Class in the 60's, so leaving the table without eating my lunch* simply wasn't an option. Eventually, however, the dishes were cleared. I was left to sit in the middle of the dining room on a peculiar half-size slatted folding chair staring into the fireplace as a penance, while my parents glared at me and each other disapprovingly. I'm maybe 6 at the time, and develop a screaming headache that begins to make me feel queasy, but I'm not allowed to speak. Through the tears, the room starts to take on a strange distorted perspective. With hindsight (and for the first time, as I write this) this may be my earliest memory of Micropsia (or is it Macropsia?), also known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which I have always found rather funky but this is not a pleasant event.

* Not that middle class, I guess. We were Northerners, so it was Breakfast, Dinner and Tea for us. "Lunch" is merely a later affectation on my part.