2: Roast Lamb

The Sunday roast is a British tradition. Ask any be-backpacked traveller (that's a convenient term for "middle class and on holiday for three months") in the deepest darkest jungles of Cambodia what they miss most about Britain and they'll probably answer that they miss sitting down with their nearest and dearest for prime roasted meats, potatoes and vegetables, shrouded in rich gravy and topped off with Yorkshire puddings the size of Chichester.

My family is arguably odder than most; but not for any terrible reason, I love them all dearly. It's quite rare now that my immediate family unit (Parents and sister) sit around for dinner, just the four of us - both me and Liz having flown the proverbial nest and spawned children over the last decade. And it's a shame, because I think we're the perfect eccentric family. We'll leave me out of the descriptions, because I'll presume that you know I'm daft... the constant stream of hate-filled blogs pays testimony to that fact. My sister is the butt for the least of my jokes onstage, the hardest working person I know, a brilliant mum, sister and daughter and someone who you can have no comeback to, regardless of the base insults she casually tosses in my direction. A typical exchange between us would go like this:

ME: Hello, Liz.
LIZ: You look like a twat in those trainers.
ME: You have a point. I'm going over there to think about the many mistakes I've made.

My Dad is known to most of the people who know me through comedy as the wonderfully robust gentleman who sometimes drives me to gigs for no reason other than I'm doing OK out of comedy and I was always shit at football as a kid. He only wears black, not because he's the world's oldest and chunkiest goth, but because it's all he likes. He's got a wardrobe like a cut-price Don Simpson (I held back from the more obvious Johnny Cash reference there) - swing the door open and there are reams of black shirts and black jeans from K-Mart, and my parent's garage is full of bottles of Dreft Dark, purchased in the fear that one day it'll be discontinued and my Dad will no longer be the enigmatic man in black, more the slightly peeved man in Charcoal.

My mum is a wonderful woman. She's an awesome influence on my life, and the bravest woman in the universe. She's also responsible for quite a lot of my material, through sheer daftness. Why, just the other day she was talking to people over dinner and she said the following:

"Of course, young people don't go courting these days, do they? What do they call it now? Trapping?"

The fact that she has such a great sense of humour regarding my material is reflected in the end of my hour long show where I tell what I think is quite a touching story about her attending one of my gigs after getting the all clear from her cancer treatment. Steve Bennett called it a "pathos tinged climax", which meant I had to explain what that meant to my family. My mother thought it was a Greek Island, my sister one of the Muskahounds. I tried telling her that they were based on the Muskateers but I chickened out. I like the idea that Dogtanian was the original story, it was better.

On the rare occassions we get together for Sunday Lunch it is always a jovial, enjoyable and memorable affair. But I can guarantee that one thing will happen. I will enter the house and ask what we're having for lunch. My father will inevitably answer "Roast Lamb" with a smile on his face. He does this for a reason.

If you rank Roast Lamb as the king of all Roasts then you are a filthy liar. My order of roast preference goes like this - and therefore is completely reflective of society as a whole, because I'm a 30 year old male.

1: Roast Beef
2: Roast Chicken
3: Roast Turkey
4: Roast Pork (not a fan, but I appreciate it has a place)
5: Roast Duck
6: Roast Pheasant
7: Roast Ostrich
8: Roast Kangaroo
9: Roast Centipede
10: Roast Sea Slug
11: Roast Lemur
12: Roast Flying Squirrel
13: Roast Lighthouse-Keeper
14: Roast Bellybutton Fluff
15: Roast Lamb (at a push)

Just thinking about roast lamb makes me gag a little. Some meats are not meant to be roasted. If to enjoy a roast meat you need to cover it in mint sauce (the sauce of the devil, let's be honest) then it probably doesn't taste nice. Why enjoy the wondrous texture of beef when you could have the sliminess of lamb? Why savour a melt in the mouth slice of roast turkey when you could be chewing on a slice of baby sheep for half an hour?

The people who enjoy a lamb shish kebab or curry, I bear you no ill will. The meat of the sheep was intended to be diced, skewered and slathered in herbs and spices. For every one roast lamb someone has to be without a curry and eat Tandoori Trout. Do you want THAT on your conscience?