Sunday Lunch.

When I was growing up, you could always tell it was sunday by the smell of the sunday roast drifting over the village at lunchtime. Sunday lunch was the time when all the family sat down for the roast lamb, pork or beef followed by a filling sweet and followed then by parents retiring to bed and children getting out to play. Sunday lunch was an unchanging ritual.

Today things are different. The main sunday meal can be consumed anytime between midday and bedtime and the meal may well be anything from roast beef to nut cutlets and often accompanied by a nice glass of wine, something virtually unknown in my childhood. The one place that seems to remain a bastion of the sunday lunch tradition are the pubs that provide sunday meals where the traditional roast still predominates. I suspect that the emergance of pubs that provide reasonably priced sunday roasts may well have saved the sunday lunch tradition from near extinction, especially as such pubs are usually family friendly. Perhaps the relaxed liscencing laws have had the unplanned effect of saving a long established British tradition.