Who Ate All the Pies?

It's supposedly a familiar cry on the terraces at football grounds up and down the land, as some player who's clearly not in the prime of fitness gets a fairly gentle ribbing from the crowd. Where this peculiar saying started though, goodness only knows.

There's nothing like a tasty pie, be it fruit-laden or meat-filled, or even a decent cheese and onion pasty. My younger brother actually makes a pretty mean chicken and ham one, for the record. And let's not forget the virtues of the humble sausage roll, veteran culinary guest as so many picnics this time of the year.

But you can, or should, only eat so much pastry, or else you end up becoming more lard-laden than the fatty shortening that makes this universarlly popular treat, and which gives pies and tarts that uniquely satisfying "mouth feel".

Anybody looking at my middle aged spread (and no, it's not Flora) might well think I'd been spending too much time in Greggs, supposedly masters of the pasty, but in fact I eat very little pastry, deliberately- but far too much, I know, of other food. I do like my grub.

Nevertheless, I'm at a loss to know why somebody combined the search terms "Mark Savage Pies" in Google, and got pointed in the direction of this blog! Even stranger is the fact, according to my site meter, that they then spent quite a time reading it. I'm flattered, or should that be fattered?

There are dangers, obviously, in relying too much on a pastry-filled diet and becoming ever more flabby as a result. The same thing applies just as much to spiritual the spiritual diet, I think. We can rely too much on quick fix soundbites or Sunday "sausage rolls" of worship. Yet it's extra-ordinary what a healthy diet of bible-based food, with a prayer topping, can do for the inner man (or indeed, woman or child). Rather than pastry, we need to take in more bread- and not just five slices a day, the well-balanced way so they say.

Jesus Christ claimed to be the bread of life, giving the inner man sustenance that not even the finest pastry chef could concoct. We can never 'eat' too much of him. Spiritual sustenance from the Word of God is the real fuel which makes life taste so much richer, and I'm happy to eat of that til all the flour mills run dry.