Pie

Pie!

Pie is aces. Everybody loves pie. What’s not to love about pie?

There are many, many types of pie, of which I am an avid student, but there are also grave dangers involved which may trick the unwary pie-eater into a life of foul sexual deviancy and unnatural consumption of Battenberg.

Let us, then, take a closer look at our subject.

Savoury: There's nothing like a good, home-made steak and kidney, although the majority of said pies you buy in the shops are incredibly nasty. Having said that, I could eat a quality tinned steak and kidney pudding every night of the week, and hardly keel over with a heart attack, at all. Some of the faithful will often enjoy a pie deep-fired. They are, according to the World Society of the Pie: “Mental”.

Sweet: My mum used to make the world's best ever blackcurrant pie - home grown blackcurrants into a pie that I can polish off on my own over several evenings. Unfortunately, she's rather slackened off her output since she died, and haven't had one of these beauties in over five years. Apple Pie, excellent that it is when served correctly, symbolises America, and for this reason only, it shall henceforth be known as Great Satan Pie.

A word of warning. There are many things out there which claim to be pie, but are clearly not pie. Sausage rolls, for instance. And Cornish Pasties, which are nearly pie, but fail on several key pie tests.

Then there are lattice lid “pies” and the dreaded flan which no man in their right mind should consume.

Lattice lids are veering dangerously close to the world of flan, and all the bumming connotations involved. To illustrate this point in the starkest way possible, there will be an episode in the next series of Doctor Who called "The Doctor has flan for tea. A big, gay flan, and I should know because I wrote Queer as Folk, and that had flan in it too, signed Russell T Davies."

Even Mr Kipling’s so-called pies may be refused admission to any pie-related get-together through their insistence on hanging around with undesirable cakes and their preference for cream instead of double-thick custard. They are, I am afraid to say, just the start of a slippery slope that ends with Cake.

Pie is, and should always remain a stout, manly pursuit.

Other pie: Finger.