When I was a teenager my brother and I would consume massive amounts of corn flakes, usually a bowl or two for breakfast and always a bowl on our return from school. Sometimes I had them with a bit of honey or a drizzle of golden syrup, but mainly with a sprinkling of granulated sugar and of course a big splash of chilled milk, preferably full fat. In the good old days I remember the milk man delivering bottles of non-homoginised whole milk with the fat separated at the top of the bottle. In the winter when opening the front door to retrieve the bottles I'd see that a Robin had sometimes pecked through the bottle top to get to the cream, but I didn't mind, I just loved the privilege of pressing the foil lid down to release it from the top of the glass bottle neck. But the real treat came when I got to pour the sweet milk all over my corn flakes with little lumps of cream sitting in the top of my bowl along side those toasted flakes of golden corn.
My mother, on occasion, tried to fob us off with supermarket home brand corn flakes and even transferred the substandard yellow flakes into a Kellogg's box. It never worked. Mainly because in the nineties cheap cornflakes were a different colour and had a softer texture, Kellogg's were darker, more orangey and had a crispy bite (today there isn't a huge difference between Kellogg's and the supermarkets). With the corn flakes being so crispy I had a technique to soften them up, I used the back of my spoon to push down every flake in the bowl so it was submerged in the delicious, icy cold milk. This was such a ritual that my mother's friends called me the pie maker, as I spent rather a long time on this process. It was only after I made this pie (personally I think it resembled more of a pudding than a pie) that I would gently sprinkle the sugar over the top, but because I'd used my spoon to dunk the flakes during the pie making process, it was sodden with milk and the sugar would stick to the spoon, so I had to submerge it under the milk to release the sugary mess that coated it (I probably should have used a second spoon for the sugar). Only then I could devour my corn flake pie and afterwards bring the bowl rim up to my mouth to drink the sugary sweet milk that remained at the bottom. My mother would say "manners make a man", my response to this, bearing in mind I'd just created a disgusting noise from slurping down the milk, was a gigantic belch. To this day I still get a kick out of trying to shock my mother, usually with the word CUNT!
