🍍🍰🍦☕ Friday 27th June: A Peculiar Confluence of Comestibles 🍦🍰🍍☕

By Virgil Twobyfour
Gentleman Gardener, Bewildered Bon Vivant, and Somewhat Sticky

Well my dears, what a day it is! According to the inexhaustibly peculiar calendar of national this-and-that, today is not one, not two, but four most auspicious occasions rolled into one peculiar pastry: Multiculturalism Day, National Ice Cream Cake Day, National Cream Tea Day, and International Pineapple Day. That’s a lot to take in for a Friday morning, and I must confess I’m already dizzy.

The more I ponder this marvellous melting pot, the more my thoughts seem to coalesce into a glorious image: imagine, if you will, a perfectly reasonable cream tea - scones resplendent with jam and clotted cream- perched atop a delicate layer of ice-cream cake, which itself is smothered in tropical pineapple chunks, and then shared in warm fellowship across the village green with all and sundry. Perhaps Mrs Trubshaw would pass around slices with a smile as broad as the allotment gate. Old Jim would insist the pineapple must be tinned, as “fresh fruit is a bit too cosmopolitan for these parts,” and the vicar would declare it “ecumenical” with his mouth full of crumbs.

And I daresay that even our little green will never look finer than it would in such a state: a veritable edible emblem of everyone and everything together - much like the Little Country itself, which, for all its quirks and peculiarities, is richer for every soul and every story.

Of course, this isn’t the first time something of this peculiar magnitude has graced the village. Do you remember the summer of ’68, when the Women’s Institute decided to make a “Community Trifle” so enormous it had to be constructed in the church font? Or that time we tried to organise a “Global Cheese Night,” and half the villagers mistook gouda for a neighbourly insult and went home in a huff? And let us never forget the Great Fruitcake Incident of 1977, when someone decided marzipan was optional and most of us went about with crumbs in our cardigans for a week. Ah yes, our shared history is richly strewn with these brave (if not always entirely successful) attempts at culinary diplomacy.

There would be a warm breeze, the kind that smells faintly of cut grass and somebody’s suspiciously boozy gooseberry wine. Children would chase one another between the tables, ducks would have a hopeful wander up from the pond, and the very air would hum with the sort of joy that needs no explanation.

We may not truly understand every tradition or every tongue, but goodness me - on a day like this, in a place like this, that hardly matters. What matters is that we’re all here together, under the same slightly wobbly sunshade, sharing our slightly wobbly tea cakes and utterly unlikely combinations of dessert.

And you know what? That might just be the sweetest pudding of all.

Keep kind, keep laughing, and may your spoon forever hit the pineapple at exactly the right angle.

Your cheerfully overstuffed neighbour,
Virgil 🍍🍰🍦☕

Virgil goes on about stuff over at notesfromthepottingshed.blogspot.com