Chocolate pudding

It's been 5 days since the boot came off. Actually maybe it's more than 5. Truth is the whole thing's turned into a blur of pain and muscle spasm. Every day I've got myself to my local pool and ploughed up and down it, revelling in the millimetres of increased movement in the foot. Every day I've done my water squats, water balancing, water hopping and water walking. I've even got to the point of climbing out of the pool using the steps (you know! like able bodied people do!) instead of winching myself out in the special disabled chair that you have to wait so long for someone to come and operate that you have hyopothermia by the time they've hauled you out) or  heaving myself out on my front with my Popeye-like arms (months of crutches will do that to your biceps and triceps), and then slowly and tortuously lifting myself from beached whale to one legged synchronised swimmer position. Climbing out of the pool! On both feet! Very exciting. But the minute I have to make regular contact with a flat and uncompromising surface - pavements, roads, anywhere that isn't grass really - the pain begins. My legs fight it so hard they feel like they have been through several workouts after just a 15 minute walk from the station to home. It's wearing, exhausting, sometimes tearful, and pretty thankless - after all, a visible walking aid elicits sympathy, while no apparent reason for stumbling and swearing denotes either chronic lack of basic fitness or, well, drunkenness. Not a good impression at all. So there has to be an antidote, a reward, an escape. Yesterday as I hauled myself into the house on feet that were begging to be slotted into large blocks of ice and left there forever, I thought about what might meet the case here. And the first one was, a welcomely open bottle of Beyerskloof Pinotage. And the other was, chocolate pudding. Everyone has their ultimate comfortfest, and I'm not particularly loyal about mine (except for the fact that it inolves some form of cake, usually chocolate based) but there really is something ultimately brow-soothing about chocolate pudding. Chocolate pudding in my schoolgirl memory is that blancmange-wobbly stuff that came out of tins and was plonked unceremoniously on my tin plate at school by the scowling Kitchen Manager. I didn't care, I loved it even back then. This was stuff that slipped down you without you even having to go to the trouble of tasting it. These days my chocolate pudding is a bit more sophisticated than that, but actually not that much. I use a Nigella recipe - again (Honestly? If it's Chocolate It Has To Be Nigella) which is totally genius. It takes all of about 7 minutes to make and literally involves the same plonking method as that of my school memories. Get some self raising flour. Chuck it into a bowl with some cocoa powder, sugar and ground hazelnuts. Whisk up egg, milk, vanilla and butter in another bowl. Combine the two. Smear it into a buttered dish. That's the body of your chocolate pudding. But the magic happens in the sauce. Add loads and loads of dark Muscovado sugar, to loads and loads of cocoa powder. It comes up looking like dark, grainy sand. Scatter it richly across your pudding mixture. And then get a jug of boiling water and pour it over the top. Don't mix it in. It goes into the oven looking, disconcertingly, like something your kids would hail as the best raw material for mud pies. But when it comes out of the oven 35 minutes or so later, it has transformed. It has turned into an unctuous, sticky, molten, steaming, fragrant, unbelievably rich, chocolate pudding. Aaaah. I ease my feet out of my ice blocks - now they've returned to their normal size I can actually get them into my Fitflop slippers and stand up, albeit a bit unsteadily (all that pinotage...), I scoop two spoons of chocolate pudding into the bowl, pad into the lounge, park myself in front of Master and Commander (that film has more swashbuckling eye candy than a girl has a right to expect), and I'm in Melinda Decompression Heaven.