Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding

My first physiotherapy appointment, with a lovely young woman who massages my healing brand new foot, asking anxiously every 2 seconds whether I can feel any pain. Aaaaah, I say. Ooooooh. Is that pain? Does it hurt? What does that noise mean? She asks. Eeeee. Oooooh. I have no words for the amazingness of a foot massage, particularly a foot that has started its life encased in blue fibreglass for 6 weeks and remains strapped in the left leg of a Star Wars Jedi costume equivalent for another 3. My metatarsals are experiencing a release equivalent to an escape from Colditz. It is stiff and unfamiliar but it knows freedom when it sees it, and it is a very very happy limb. You need to flex the toes, she says. Flex the toes!! I whoop. That's brilliant! How often can I do that!! She looks at me strangely. I have to apologise to her for my overwhelming joy. But I've been dragging myself around for so long my shoulders are about to go on strike, I feel as if I've put on megastones and I have huge withdrawal symptoms from my weeks and weeks of abstinence from any meaningful cardiovascular exercise. This is a Very Big Moment. Can I swim, I ask her hopefully? Give it a go, gently, and see how it goes, she advises. I'm off like a shot. Fifty lengths later, I'm as high as a kite. I can swim! Well, I can definitely walk through the water, which is miraculous enough by itself. I can do a sort of a one legged front crawl if I pull my tummy in really really tightly to stop me from drowning. But I'm moving! Without sticks or crutches! It's time for a celebration. I hobble home, back in my Star Wars boot, and open my breadbin. You wouldn't think it would be possible, just a few days after the end of Passover, that there would be any leftover bread, but there is. I pull the whole lot out. Peel off the crusts. Cut them into triangles. Butter both sides. Layer them in a dish with white chocolate and dark chocolate chips in between each layer. Make up a fabulous, gooey sauce with egg, vanilla, milk, and loads and loads and LOADS of my fave baking chocolate. Pour it over my bread. Leave it to stand for ten minutes while I admire it. Sprinkle it with sugar, and when the bread has absorbed most of the sauce, I put it in the oven. I take it out half an hour later. I have no intention of eating this fabulousness of a pudding. I won't get a look in anyway - my family loves this pudding, and this afternoon just minutes after it came out of the oven, one of my kids pitched up from school with a mate who clocked it the minute they walked into the kitchen and made straight for a plate and spoon. See? It'll be gone even before the dinner for which it was baked. No, I made this thing because it smells. It smells rich and rewarding. It fills the house. In fact judging by the way my neighbours are gathering outside my door with their noses uplifted, it's filling the street. And the smell of celebratory food is evocative, it's a memory that stays with you forever. Chocolate bread and butter pudding. I will, from now on, always associate its smell with the smell of liberated feet.