Once we had stuffed ourselves quite stupid and mopped up the oil and juices with bread rolls, we sat down to get ready for an equal volume of pudding in an hour or two, followed by biscuits and candy floss two hours after that. Anyone who hadn’t consumed at least five times their usual calorific intake might be deemed not taking the whole ‘bulk up’ issue seriously.

We talked some more, catching up on news. What ex-poolers were up to, who had died, then a long procession of do-you-remember-whens that seemed to have become less shocking and more amusing with the passage of time: about Donna Trinket’s accident – always a perennial favourite – or when Betty Simcox was nearly buried alive during a prank that went wrong, or when Joplin set fire to herself in a prank that went about as well as anyone had expected – and then, as always, how Dai Powell vanished on his sixteenth birthday and returned on his twentieth, and no one knew where he’d been.

‘He still has no idea,’ said Lucy. ‘I asked him again only last week.’

‘Kidnapped into domestic service by Villains is my guess,’ said Megan, ‘but too ashamed to admit it.’

After the jam roly-poly, apple crumble and bread-and-butter pudding had been consumed with about two gallons of custard, Mother Fallopia gave a speech. It was the same old Fat Thursday stuff that we’d heard before, many times: about how we must all embrace the virtues of gluttony and sloth as we headed towards the Winter, and to remember those who had not survived hibernation last year through not being diligent about their weight, and to consider a career with the Sisterhood if female, and if male then to do one’s utmost to be a productive member of society and to honour the Princess Gwendolyn daily and remain loyal to Wales and the Northern Federation – and so on and so forth. She then announced her retirement due to a slackening of fertility, and proclaimed she would be putting the reins of St Granata’s firmly in Sister Placentia’s hands, which was met by half-hearted applause and, somewhere at the back, a groan.

Sector Chief Winter Consul Logan then made a speech, about how the Sisterhood were more than doing their part to head off the spectre of Winter wastage, thanked Mother Fallopia for her numerous confinements and wise and committed leadership of St Granata’s, welcomed Sister Placentia to her new-found position of authority, then repeated much of what Mother Fallopia had said. Right at the end he related a short ditty that seemed, at the time, entirely random:

To escort a likely lad from lower Llanboidy with collies and brollies from Chiswick while Krugers with Lugers take potshots at hotshots is enough to make mammoths with a gram’s worth of hammocks feel down with a clown from Manchester Town.