Roast and a host of maiden aunts: Doraine Potts laments the demise of her traditional Sunday afternoons

THE FAMILY that shops together stops together; well, even if that is not true, someone, sometime, will doubtless persuade us that it is so. Especially now that, Mammon be praised, we can all go shop on Sundays.

We probably have no right to fuss about the demise of the day of rest, since it appears we never knew what to do with it anyway. Look at those awful pictures the newspapers keep trotting out, showing an old-fashioned British family enduring its boring Sunday dinner. Just be thankful that you can now drag the kids round the shops instead, and do your bit for Britain by dropping a donation into the collection plate of consumerism.

Actually, those old pictures arouse very pleasant feelings of nostalgia in me: I always looked forward to Sundays when I was a child. The food was good, the adults were available and my Welsh aunties came for the day. There was a substantial number of them, for my grandmother had borne 14 children. My mother was one of the lucky ones who had married and therefore had a proper home. The ones who visited were spinsters, living on precariously modest incomes in genteel bed-sitting rooms with no cooking facilities. When they came to spend Sunday with us, they ate their only cooked dinner of the week.

They came bearing gifts and food coupons. I now realise that the generous size of our Sunday roast was dependent on my aunts' offering a whole week's meat ration for one good dinner and an afternoon's company. Their thirst for talk, after a week's isolation, was almost unquenchable. It was as much as anyone could do to get a word in. When the meal and the washing- up were done, we listened to comedy programmes on the wireless, after which the real entertainment began.

My aunts believed themselves to be richly talented. They were convinced that only the poverty and the restricted opportunities of their childhood had prevented them from becoming famous for their dancing, singing and acting. Every Sunday afternoon they threw themselves, without inhibition, into routines which deserved a wider audience. Nothing I have seen on stage or screen has ever quite equalled the sight of Aunt Nell, flat-chested and bespectacled, shimmying her way seductively across the living room, while my mother played Carmen Miranda records on our old wind-up gramophone.

Aunt Maud recited. She was particularly good at a dramatic piece which began, promisingly, with 'It was Christmas Day in the workhouse' and reached a thrilling climax when one of the inmates, whose wife had just died of starvation, choked on the food set before him, instead of touching his forelock and being properly grateful. Did a pauper refuse his pudding? I just loved that bit. She also declaimed - I use the word advisedly - a piece called Cato's Soliloquy, only she called it 'Plato's Solicitor' and none of us had the heart to tell her he didn't have one.

Aunt Flo neither danced nor sang, but could tell fortunes with a pack of cards. First, she selected the picture card which represented your colouring - I was the queen of clubs, but longed secretly to be hearts - then, when you had shuffled and cut the pack three times, she would dispose the top dozen or so round the queen, so she could tell you What Crowns You, What Faces You, What You Turn Your Back On and What Lies at Your Feet.

My aunts and my mother all had thoroughly Welsh imaginations, so it took them no time at all to flesh out what the cards suggested. The prognostications always came true.

After the cards, there was always tea, cake and talk. Only the Irish can rival the Welsh for conversation, especially when it comes to supplementing the sober truth with a bit of imaginative embroidery. My aunts' conversation was spiked with malice and superstition and the language they used was rich in metaphor. Nowhere else have I heard the phrase 'black as the devil's netting bag', an expression made all the more curious to me because, for a long time, I heard it as 'knitting bag' and thought it oddly cosy for the devil.

They spoke of people who 'supped sorrow by the spoonful' or who, when they slept, 'went down into the bottomless pit'. Best of all, I liked it when they said 'If God were to strike me dead . . .' and then followed this solemn oath with an absolutely whopping lie.

The aunts are all long since dead. I know now that they led sad and lonely lives and that these Sunday visits were the only taste of family life they ever had. My mother successfully concealed the fact that she did not always welcome their coming and that she would often have preferred a quiet Sunday to herself. The point was that Sunday was special and you couldn't leave people to spend the day alone, in their pathetic little bed-sits.

I suppose it will be easier for the lonely from now on. They can go shopping, can't they?

Angela Lambert's column will appear tomorrow.