Donald Clarke: Which came first, the guilt or the Creme Egg?

I like the National Public Radio (NPR) politics podcasts. You get an hour of proper American journalists – the sort who fact-check the colour of a politician’s underwear – saying things like “pork barrel”, “entitlements” and “unprecedented dereliction of presidential responsibility”. These people are funny. But they’re also serious in ways we can’t even fake.

So imagine my surprise when, in the closing "can't stop thinking about" section, the urbane Scott Detrow, who wears grown-up glasses, mentioned the dying days of this year's Creme Egg season. "They're delicious," Scott announced before going on to confirm that he would not want them to be available all year round. Like so many, Scott gets tempted at the checkout and, rather than nibbling round the top like a pantywaist, wolfs it down in one muppet-mouthed gulp.

The Creme Egg and, more specifically, the regulation of its sale provide us with one of the few surviving remnants of civilisation as it used to be lived

It had not occurred to me that the combination of discipline and indulgence that characterises Creme Egg Season had caught on in the United States. True, they are a great nation for retail seasons. You can't buy a lawn chair in October or a snow shovel in April. But both the construction of the Egg and the manner of its sale are, for slightly different reasons, ideally suited to the UK and Irish psyche.

The British have never quite shaken the fetishisation of confectionary that set in during the last World War. They feel simultaneously guilty and enthralled when put before the least sophisticated amalgam of sugar and cocoa solids.

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Soppy

Your Frenchy nob will get all soppy when dipping a madeleine in his filthy not-really-tea. Such things, for the British and Irish, carry nothing like the nostalgic charge of a Topic, an Icebreaker or an Aztec (I fear at least two of those may no longer exist.) How much more delicious and guilt inducing such things will seem if they are actually rationed. You know. Like in the war. I could be wrong here. But I suspect the Creme Egg is the only product whose sale is regulated by the appearance of a full moon after the vernal equinox. (Okay, that covers all Easter eggs. But no specific brand has anything like the resonance of the Creme Egg.)

Ireland has its own reasons for twinning guilt with indulgence. We don't need to go into these again, but, suffice to say, the coincidence of Lent with Creme Egg season adds another layer of transgression to their consumption. The emotion could, perhaps, be heightened by eating the egg while indulging in some kind of self-punishment. Wearing rocks around the neck. Ritual whipping of the torso. Those sorts of things.

Anyway, the time has come to say something that probably isn’t true, but that is worth saying anyway. The Creme Egg and, more specifically, the regulation of its sale provide us with one of the few surviving remnants of civilisation as it used to be lived. The product itself is the perfect combination of delicious and revolting. When else would you consume that degree of barely mediated fondant? It’s like eating mustard by the spoon or sugar by the ladle. Your friend told me that it is, in this sense, a little like satisfactory sex: the participant is always just on the right side of the line dividing the delicious from the vile. Being very nearly disgusted with yourself is part of the fun. That’s what your friend said, anyway.

Degree of prohibition

Guilt and a degree of prohibition about such things is what separates us from the beasts of the field. It’s not just that the governing authority – the Pope, the Chief Druid, that part of Kraft that runs Cadbury – tells us we’re not allowed to eat fish on a Friday, marry our cow or eat Creme Eggs after Easter Sunday. It’s the fact that we willingly embrace such prohibitions.

At some point in the 1980s, after President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher made it okay to be an arse, we were all supposed to have embraced the notion of perpetual satisfaction. We're going to play Dire Straits CDs whenever we like. We're going to bellow down mobile phones on trains. We're not going to be told what to do by the tired remnants of unreconstructed Victorian industries. Do you know that George Cadbury established his company as a model of social responsibility? The staff lived in generous accommodation and an effort was made . . . Sod that, Chairman Mao. I want my Creme Egg in June.

Here’s the funny thing. In that very decade, Cadbury made an effort to sell the Egg all year round. Overall sales immediately plummeted. The ritual was part of the attraction.

We need more such recreational denial. Let’s make the sale of doughnuts a seasonal matter. Let’s allow ice-cream only during daylight saving time. Let’s ban the sale of alcohol on Good Friday.

It’s just a thought.