November 12 1997
Alan Coren
The strange case of a combustible comestible from California

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Look it in the bowels. In the 
bowels is where the Greeks lurk, waiting to debouch and sack.

A free pudding arrived this morning. I did not immediately know it 
was a free pudding, I did not know it was any kind of pudding, I knew 
only that the doorbell had trilled, and that I had signed for a small 
yet heavy cardboard cube which I carried into the kitchen, put on the 
table, and looked at. I now knew it had come from the United States, 
because it had 32 Elvis Presley stamps covering the whole of one flank; 
which in itself was arresting, since, set out as they were in painstaking 
phalanx, the effect the Elvises collectively created was of a small, 
silkscreened Warhol. The person who stuck these down, ran my first 
thought, is no ordinary person. I lifted the box again, turned it, and 
now saw that it carried a US Customs declaration, identifying it as 
"gifted comestible bakery for personal consumption, value not more than $10".

Knowing me as you do, you will be unsurprised to learn that I spent the 
next minute or so wondering just how gifted this comestible bakery might 
be: given the limitless ingenuity of Americans, the box could well contain, 
say, a dozen tap-dancing bagels, or an angel cake with a PhD in quantum 
mechanics, or a fondant fancy which, when its glace cherry was poked, did 
an impression of Groucho Marx reciting the Gettysburg Address -- remote 
offchances, I grant you, especially for less than ten bucks, but, then 
again, the box bore a California postmark, so nothing was impossible.

It was time either to chuck it in a bucket of water and run, or open it. 
Not the easiest of choices -- a gifted West Coast comestible carried by 32 
obsessively arranged Elvises gives off a sharp psychopathic whiff -- but I 
am not young, it has been a full life, my affairs are in order, and the 
daily was using the bucket, so I removed the wrapping paper, and prised 
open the lid.

Nothing went bang. Inside, there was a lot of bubble-wrap, and inside that 
there was a lot of tinfoil, and inside that there was something not, indeed, 
unlike a bomb: the sort of bomb you find in animated cartoons, round, black, 
shiny, and with a curly thing poking out of the top; in this instance holly. 
It smelt of brandy. It was a Christmas pudding.

It had a card for me. The card had holly on it, too, and robins, and silver 
bells, and a dark brown stain indicating that a long, boring flight in such 
tantalising proximity to booze had got the better of the card. A pity, 
because when I plucked the card out to discover who my distant benefactor was, 
all I discovered was that his/her writing had been illegibilised by the 
pudding's stain. Worst of all, there was no way of telling whether the card 
had ever carried a name or address. I say worst of all not because it meant 
that I could not write to thank my benefactor, it meant that, if he/she had 
withheld the name or address, how could I be sure that the pudding had not 
been sent by a distant malefactor?

There are a lot of very peculiar characters over there, mooching the Pacific 
shoreline and jabbering to themselves; they follow strange gods, they imbibe 
strange substances, they do strange things, often serially. In a culture 
whose legally appointed guardians once sent exploding cigars to Fidel Castro, 
who could with any confidence say that some unofficial crackpot, some lunatic 
sect, had not decided to express its contempt for Christmas by filling the 
mails with poisoned puddings?

I know six people in California. I phoned them all, even though I had not seen 
them in 20 years, and asked. I have little doubt that all six subsequently 
hung up thanking their lucky stars that, however wacky California might be, 
it wasn't as wacky as England. What do I do now? I do not want to bin what 
might be a delicious treat from someone who loves me, but nor do I want, 
on Christmas Day, to walk into my dining room with a flaming item designed 
to snuff the lot of us out.

Have I, that is, been sent a Trojan pudding? When dotty old Ezra Pound 
foresaw "new Troys that tumble, sizzling", was he perhaps thinking of 
Cricklewood? With crazy Americans, you can never be sure.
