Doughnuts

As Steve Morrow tumbled from Paul Merson's shoulders in a moment of calamitous celebration in the wake of Arsenal's Coca-Cola Cup triumph, resulting in a broken arm for the goal-scoring Morrow, I shovelled doughnut number seventeen into my mouth. My family were at Big Jenny's house, the host given the unfortunate adjective 'Big' to differentiate her from my little sister Jenny - she wasn't overweight, just an adult. I think it was a birthday party of some sort, but my obsession with Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday competing for the non-event of the Coca-Cola Cup had sent me scuttling to a bedroom where I found a tiny television that I could watch the event on.

Every eight minutes or so I made the short trip from bedroom to front room to pick up a tasty doughnut. Now, whilst the adjective 'big' was largely inaccurate in paragraph one, the adjective 'tasty' is entirely appropriate for these doughnuts. They were the type with sharp jagged sugar attached to the outer bun, not those deficient soggy articles that come in packs of ten and have had sugar sweated onto their outer shells. The jam within was lively and lurched from the doughnut on the first bite, far superior to the congealed tasteless injection of red nothingness that is commonly the filling. Their sublime tastiness meant my journey to the plate was repeated time and time again until I felt slightly queasy and wide-eyed from my afternoon's snacking which had gone unnoticed by my parents who surely would have issued an, "I think you've had enough" warning had they been aware of my excessive consumption.

As a child I seemed to be able to consume extraordinary amounts of food. Shredded Wheat's slogan in the early 80s was, "Bet You Can't Eat Three" with their advert showing a shocked hotel staff when Ian Botham ordered a bowl of three for his morning snack, yet as a young child, on one particularly ravenous morning, I chomped my way through eighteen full-size cardboardy wheat cocoons.

Something must have been wrong with me to have taken so much food into my infant belly. Did I have worms? If I did, it was never treated and the worms trundled away unnoticed at some point, because I would never be able to achieve such eating feats nowadays although I do have a custard doughnut sitting in the kitchen that I'm going to pay a visit to when my fingers have stopped tappety-tapping, but it will just be the one.