Toast. Nigel Slater

custard. The cream, so thick you could stand a spoon up in it, was always scooped out of its shallow, white-and-blue tin into the gravy boat and passed round the table. There was a fight, albeit a silent one, to get to the cream jug before Auntie Fanny. Brought up in a family that had never known cream, she was making up for it now, taking almost half the jugful. You could barely see her slice of pudding under it. ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough cream there, Auntie?’ my brother would say, followed by a glaring scowl from my father. He aimed it at Adrian but it was just as much meant for Auntie Fanny.

      It was essential to get the cream before Fanny for another reason. She had a hooked beak of a nose. An Edith Sitwell sort of a nose. And on the end of that beak there was a permanent dewdrop of thin, clear snot. I can never remember her without it, apart from a few seconds after she wiped it with her flowery hanky and tucked it up the sleeve of one of her baby-blue or lemon cardigans.

      When she got to the cream first, five pairs of eyes would focus intently on the glistening bud at the end of her nose, everyone willing the shining bead not to drop until she passed the cream jug on to someone else. Except me. I prayed that one day it would happen, and wondered what everyone would do if it did. Would we have to open another tin? Would my father cover Auntie’s embarrassment by just stirring it in and slopping it over his pud? I sat there, my fists clenched in my lap, willing, begging it to happen. I would have relished it. Even more so if no one but me had noticed.