Why cheese, peas and chocolate pudding?

When I was little my madre used to read a story to my sister and I called ‘cheese, peas and chocolate pudding’. It was about a little boy who was very picky about the food he ate, I suppose the moral of the story was to encourage little ones to try everything once. I was never a particularly picky child when it came to food, my mum always cooked homemade meals with lots of vegetables so I was used to eating healthily.

As an adult, the only food I truly cannot stand are bananas, eugh. As my friend Caroline pointed out they are the most convenient fruit and it does annoy me that I can’t eat them, but they really are disgusting. I’m not entirely sure where the source of my hatred comes from? It may be genetic (!) as my madre is also a hater of the evil yellow fruit. However, I like to think it stems back to a trip I went on as a child…

Long journey’s in the car have always been a somewhat fraught experience in my family. My mother’s lack of map reading skills (in Ludlow last year she proclaimed that it’s not that she can’t read a map, she just doesn’t bother looking at it), my sister’s car sickness & my dad’s excessive use of the word ‘cretin’ tends to lead to an argument followed by stony silence. On this particular trip I must have been about 7 years old; my sister and I were in the back of the car and were doing our best to irritate one another. This is a game which has included my sister tying me to the tree in our garden for hours on end and me telling my sister to close her eyes and I’d put a sweet in her mouth (it was in fact a bird poo, evil I know!). My sister had eaten a banana earlier in the journey and took to slapping me around the face with the skin. I was covered it specs of banana gook and inevitably lots of screaming and crying ensued. My dad took no time to tell me to be quiet and stop my whingeing. As a result, I’ve not eaten a banana since, and I don’t intend to.