Have you had the back off ?

The easter eggs arrived yesterday - hurrah !!!

Just one each, one for each daughter and one for me, but we've been warned by the wife and mother, no sproaching (as she says in her geordie terminology, no we don't understand her either).

What she means is that we are not to eat the back out of the eggs before easter sunday, she knows me so well.

I told my youngest the story of how, when my brother and I were kids, we would each receive around ten easter eggs each and by the time easter sunday came around we'd have eaten the back out of all of them.

We were experts at carefully removing the packaging from the back of the easter egg box and then picking away at the chocolate and the smarties or chocolates inside, leaving the front of the egg in pristine condition so that our mum would never notice when she was cleaning around them, every year, every one of our eggs had no back left in them by easter sunday.

Until one year when our posh auntie popped around on easter saturday with a couple of easter eggs for us in her wicker basket, our mum had not bought an egg for our posh auntie's daughter and so she grabbed one of our eggs off the sideboard and gave it to her.

My brother and I nearly choked trying to keep the laughter down and after they'd left we just exploded with hysteria, it was probably an hour later that we finally admitted to our mum that the egg that she'd given to our cousin had no back in it, and no smarties either.

As usual she used the age old mothers threat "wait 'till your father gets home" but when he got home he was drunk again and found the whole thing even more hilarious than we did, our posh auntie was his posh sister and I reckon he'd been waiting all his life to put one over on her.

The back will be out of my egg before sunday.