Approaching a Sherry Trifle with Intent

Surreptitiously approaching a sherry trifle with intent to cause a breach of the peace, as we all know, has been illegal in England since that infamous day back in 1743 when a band of brigands waylaid the then Bishop of Rochester and ‘caused severe indignities to his cassock’ with a fully-creamed sherry trifle.

Consequently, any attempt to reform the law to bring the legal situation in line with sherry trifles as they are used in the modern age, has always been strongly resisted by the clergy, especially those that sit in the House of Lords.

Of course, many of us have been to those kinds of parties where, if not providing trifles themselves, the hosts of the party have turned a blind eye, if not given tacit approval to the use of sherry trifles for – as the Act says – ‘purposes other than consumption as a foodstuff’.

Critics of any such reform, such as the traditionalists in the Church of England, point to the decadent use of sherry trifle – often in public, in countries where such things are not illegal – by celebrities and other famous people and voice their concerns that such people could be taken as role models by the young and impressionable.

However, the police, customs and other such authorities say they simply no longer have the manpower to police how people use their sherry-trifles - whether in private or even in public any longer. They also point to the increasing frequency of illegal ‘Sherry- Trifle Evenings’ sometimes held in the last outposts of decency the garden suburbs of middle-England.

Even that last bastion of hypocritical double standards the Daily Mail has called for the legalisation of sherry trifles ‘and not necessarily just for eating them’. That is, as the Daily Mail put it in an editorial ‘…that it can be proved both that illicit use of sherry trifles does not cause either cancer or a massive fall in house prices.’