Do you have a favourite comfort food? Mine is a jam sandwich. Mine is baked vanilla cheesecake. Mine is creamy rice pudding. Mine is eggs benedict. Mine is lemon drizzle cake. Mine is a BLT with lashings of mayonnaise, or crumpets soaked in butter. Some are the foods of childhood; a runny boiled egg with toasted soldiers, a fish finger sandwich smeared in ketch-up or a dollop of golden syrup in a bowl of steaming porridge. But the one that tops the page, the favourite above all the rest, is something so simple, so easy on the palette; it's but a homely slice of bread and honey. That smell of sweet, sweet nectar, the taste of peach sunrise on a purple petal, the way it wraps itself around a knife, sticky and golden, the way it sticks in droplets to a breakfast plate like teardrops from a bee. I prefer the bread toasted, a multi-seeded slice mind, with a geological layer of thick, thick butter, that way the butter and honey combines and melts into the fibres, the first dream-like bite a walk inside the craters of the moon or chasing painted ladies bareback on a rainbow unicorn. Heavenly. Bread and honey after an argument with a friend. Bread and honey for a sniffly cold. Bread and honey for a bad, bad day. Bread and honey when the words won't come...
And one day I noticed two spots on her collar bone, and then two became four, became eight, became sixteen, became well over sixty four. Over her chest. On her back. Over her face. On her scalp. Over the backs of her hands. On the tops of her feet. 'Try not to scratch,' I said, 'here, look at the tiny scar under Mummy's bottom lip.' Pink cream from head to toe. Pink medicine in mouth every fourth hour. Three heaped teaspoonfuls of bicarbonate of soda in tepid bath. 'They're really annoying me, I hate it,' she said, 'it's marching over my body like red soldiers, they go chattering and chattering all over me.' We sat in front of the TV, took walks around the garden listening to the monotone hum of lawn mowers and the unfolding creaks of outdoor furniture. And every morning without fail I toasted a slice of special-treat white bread, spreading butter and honey over its browned surface being careful to cut off the crusts, slicing it into four quarters. Bread and honey for a poorly princess. Bread and honey when she's feeling in distress.
What's your favourite comfort food?
I was over the moon, nay astonished, to discover I'd made the final six in the Writer category of the Britmums Brilliance in Blogging Awards (BiBS). I want to give an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who voted and supported my blog; it's meant a lot to me, so thank you very very much! The winner will be announced at a special ceremony at Britmums Live on 20th June.
I am going away to sunny Pembrokeshire for the week so I may or may not blog, but I won't be on social media nor will I be reading any blogs for a week, so please don't be offended if you don't see any comments from me next week.
