Warning: This is a rare post about which contains stuff about, ugh, 'feelings'. Those of a nervous disposition should look away now.
Been thinking about my parents a lot over the last few days. Not only because I've spent some time in the place where my mum's ashes were scattered - it's a lovely place and I would have gone anyway, while there I saw an infamous figure/cretin in British life walking along the beach - but also because I noticed in a bookshop a film tie-in edition of Nigel Slater's rather excellent book, Toast. I don't normally go in for Top 10 Favourite whatever, but if I did one on books that would definitely be in there. It's a book about how Slater's formative years were shaped by the food he ate. Coming from a family of gluttons* I found loads of common ground with him in it. Apart from the fact that his mother was a terrible cook (it's called toast because the one abiding memory he has of her is scraping burnt toast) mine was absolutely fantastic. I think one thing people do when a family member dies is to talk about whoever it is whose gone and talk over the good times and good things. Most of our reminiscences came from the food Mum prepared. The thought that we'd never taste her macaroni cheese (pretty mundane but her macaroni cheese was gorgeous, great 'comfort food'), chocolate fudge cake, fruit scones, Yorkshire puddings, shortcrust pastry, ginger parkin, steak and kidney pie or trifle again made us shiver (well, just me on the trifle front as those two divvies don't like it). There was also the disasters but funny disasters, like when Dad, who didn't get a sophisticated palate until later in life, insisted that he'd only eat spaghetti bolognese with veg. Plates of spag bog with a healthy serving of boiled savoy cabbage on the side was duly delivered to the table. She'd also sneak carrot into lasagne and had this fetish for putting sultanas in curries. Years later, when I'd discovered curry houses, I pointed out to her that I'd never eaten in an Indian restaurant that served savoury sultanas, she laughed and told me that that's how she was taught to make curry...by an English chef.
You'd also never see her weigh anything - unless she was cooking for a competition, where strict rules applied - her skill was immense. I wish I could 'knock up a few scones' if someone gave us short notice that they were visiting or cook something delish for an ill or needy friend. Memories are all I have, like Slater.
On a slightly different subject, came back to find the great Danny Baker has fucking cancer. I say 'fucking cancer' because that's what I call it after hearing Wilko Johnson call it that on an interview recently when talking about his deceased wife. Cancer's a murderer which takes good people before their time; like Mum, three grandparents, an aunt, an uncle and several family friends. I wish Danny well and nothing but best wishes. If you can spare a few pence for a cancer charity, please do.
*There's a great photo of Mum's twin brothers at a Christmas party in the fifties. Though facing the camera neither of them are looking at it, but follow their eyeline and they only have eyes for an enormous trifle on the table.
Celery leaves are poisonous and are not to be consumed under any circumstances. I never questioned why celery was sold with the leaves still attached if that was the case. And something in the back of my mind told me to not to eat celery leaves until I saw Nigella put them into a pot roast chicken last week. Mind you, perhaps that's Nigella trying to get rid of us and create her own super race of North London-dwelling gastronomes. My sister tried to pull the same trick with the last bit of tea or coffee in a mug but I never bought that one. What do you take me for? She still leaves the last bit of tea or coffee in a mug, which didn't sit right with me when I bought her an expensive coffee last week and she left a quarter of it.
That Brian Clough lived in a big white house set on a hillside near the train line between Newark and Nottingham. My mother used to tell me this when we went on shopping trips to Nottingham. It wasn't until I was in my twenties and after Mr Clough had been found sleeping in a ditch 'near his home in Derby' (the same home he'd lived in for years) that I realised she lied. When I questioned her about it she said that it "broke the journey up to point out landmarks, even if they weren't real."
That drinking pop directly from a can caused your tongue to get trapped in the hole and they'd have to cut your tongue off. I never thought that if this did happen (and to date I've never heard of it happening), then they'd just cut the can off.
Swallowing chewing gum or bubble gum makes it wrap around your intestines and slowly kill you. I think what she was trying to say here is that she hated gum and didn't want me to have it.
That the clown who used to roll the credits on at the end of Camberwick Green was actually my dad. I never questioned why Dad went to work, completely altered his appearance and dressed as a clown. This was given more weight when I once watched Camberwick Green with some cousins and, at the end, they pointed to the screen and shouted "There's Uncle Roy!" So someone else was telling them that Dad worked for Gordon Murray productions on a part-time basis.
The Daddies Sauce bottle used to feature a neck band with a photo of a generic smiling dad that used to say underneath it "My favourite!" I was led to believe that was our Uncle Phil, as were most of the cousins in my large extended maternal family.
I reckon yesterday's attack on the 1980s may have made me look like a bit of a joy vacuum. Of course it wasn't all that bad, it's just that I get annoyed that the whole decade is summed up into Kajagoogoo, Rubik's Cubes, men in tea towels, Soda Streams and Margaret Thatcher. I had a chat about the 1980s with my sister this morning. I said to her that I think you can't take part in a revival if you're old enough to remember it the first time around. To which she replied "Speak for yourself!" Mind you, she's hung up about getting older; she's 47 on Friday. Not only that but she's been a bit off with me since I found a booklet entitled Coping With the Menopause while clearing Mum's house, I don't think she took it very well when I tossed it to her and said "This might be of use to you."
Anyway, I've decided to compile a list of what I do like about the 1980s, in no particular order:
Big Country
Brookside
Gregory's Girl
Snogging
CBTV
An American Werewolf in London
Microwavable doner kebabs
Puma G Vilas trainers
Local Hero
The Stone Roses' Fools Gold and the second part of I Am the Resurrection
The Cult's Electric
My paper round
Sagging school
Aztec Camera's Oblivious
No. 73
My dad's delight at his weekly fix of The Dukes of Hazzard
The cancellation of Doctor Who
Tape-to-tape recorders
Simple Minds
The Sledgehammer video
Clare Grogan
The Sony Walkman
John Swallow
The Falklands war - quite entertaining for an 11 year-old
Anything touched by the hand of Trevor Horn
Raw Power (not The Stooges album but a late night heavy rock and metal TV show presented by the now editor-in-chief of Mojo magazine)
Nottingham Forest winning the European Cup again
Frank Sidebottom
Blue Monday
Holidays in Rock, Cornwall
Viz
Discovering the joys of Newcastle Brown Ale
The Chart Show
Leaving school
The Tube
The Young Ones
Motorhead's No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith
The poll tax riots
The Comic Strip Presents...
Mullets - that's mine in the photo, enjoy it while you can, it comes off tomorrow. Edit: you're too late, it's another mullet now.
The YTS
The Eight Legged Groove Machine and Astley in the Noose
I've been thinking about Professor Stanley Unwin today, I don't know why, I just have. I can't think about him these days without also being reminded of something a colleague said when the news of Unwin's death was announced on the TV at work: "Thank fuck for that, I could never stand that old c**t." Which I always thought was a terrible thing to say, not only because he was being deeply disrespectful to someone who'd just died, but also because I believe that if Unwin doesn't even raise the briefest of smiles with you then you're a pretty humourless individual (that's not to say I can tell people what's funny and what's not).
Unwin always reminds me of two people who loomed large in my life when I was smaller. They were both childless but have a love of kids and loved to share little songs and stories with us. I reckon a lot of it had to do with the fact that they weren't parents themselves and didn't mind making a tit of themselves if it got a laugh out of a child. My dad, for instance, went to work, came home, had his tea, washed-up and then dropped off to sleep in front of the telly. Every night. That's not to say he was a bad parent, as he quite plainly wasn't, it's just that it was his job to provide for the kids, and be with them at weekends or on holiday.
My dad's brother, Uncle Jim was a man who spent his whole life living with our grandmother. Whenever you went he had a fresh Jane or Andy Capp book for us to look at, could knock out a tune on a concertina and would sing us songs, his favourite being one about snot and bogey pasties, exactly the sort of thing kids love. The one line I can remember went "You can have the black ones, 'cos I like the green ones." Brilliant! As recently as the mid-70s I remember going to their house and having to use an outside loo. This was always fraught with danger as it was a home to many large spiders. Uncle Jim always came good though because to take your mind off the spiders he's let you take his lantern with a flashing beacon on top to light your way. The excitement of a flashing beacon was too much to bear for this 6 year-old.
The other guy was my mum's butcher. You'd go into his shop on a Saturday morning - trying to avoid the carcasses of dead animals which were dripping blood all over the sawdust-covered floor - and the first thing he'd do would be to shout at his wife to go and fetch the biscuit tin. Biscuits were duly handed out - usually a malted milk or a sport biscuit - then he'd launch into any one of a hundred songs. Particular favourites were There Was and Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Susannah's a Silly Old Sow and one which told the tale of a woman who took a pig to market and couldn't get it over a stile. She took a stick to the pig to make it go over the stile, but the stick, unbelievably, wouldn't behave itself, so it went "Stick, stick, beat pig to get over the stile/Fire, fire burn stick to beat pig to get over the stile/Water, water, quench fire to burn stick to beat pig to get over the stile" It continued ad nauseum until the exact moment my mum's meat was cut, bagged up and paid for. Perfect timing.
Anyway, enough of my useless and uninteresting childhoodreminiscences, here's some classic Unwin. You Tube's disappointingly light on Unwinese, but fact fans, clip one contains an actor who was born on the same street as me. That's right, I was born at home, there'll be a blue plaque on that house one day.
I'm currently reading Emma Kennedy's book on family camping holidays. It's made me 'LOL' a few times, even though I'm sure that quite a lot of its been embellished for comedic purposes, nevertheless it's a good read.
All of which reminded me of the only time I've been camping (I was never in the cubs or scouts. Male-bonding has always left me slightly cold. Besides, all you seemed to do was play Britsh fucking Bulldogs). It was 1984 and my sister had just got married so mater and pater were a bit skint from forking out for a showy wedding, so a 'proper' holiday was out of the question. My other sister had announced the previous year, right at the end of a fortnight in Cornwall that she "never wanted to go on a family holiday ever again". So, as in 1984 she was 17, it was deemed that she could be trusted to stay at home on her own for a week. It was decided that we would borrow my aunt's tent and go and slum it in the Lake District, just my parents and me. In the spirit of inter-family unity, my just-married sister's new in-laws decided they would bring their tent and come with us.
Here's a run down of what went wrong that week:
First night there and the campsite offers grass-skiing, which involves hurtling down fellsides on ski boots fitted with tank tracks. Dad's too tight to pay for me to have a go so I have a go at running down the hill very fast, lost my footing and bounced down more than I ran, ripping my Brutus jeans and getting grass stains on my black and white, Big Country-style plaid shirt. Caused much hilarity with my sister's in-laws.
Got accosted by a gang of teenage girls while going to the camp shop to get my dad's Express and a bottle of milk. They could obviously smell a boy who'd never been kissed before at twenty paces. Put me off girls for at least a year.
Went to visit an uncle who worked at Sellafield and lived within sight of it. His stepson made me touch the Irish sea because "it's radioactive and you ain't got no bollocks if you don't touch it". He then took me to his bedroom where, in a display of twattishness that would shame those two American Judas Priest fans, he played me Deep Purple's Child in Time over and over again at shrieking volume. A song that still leaves me traumatised*.
Stopped for a leak in a mountain stream then thought it would be a good idea to drink the clear water with my scooped hands. The same hands that had just been holding my penis that hadn't had a proper bathing for a few days. And, in my youthful stupidity drank water downstream from where I'd just pissed. Caused much hilarity with my sister's in-laws.
Had a tin of lager which caused me to collapse into my deckchair resulting in me touching the sides of my tent. Dad went mad, got a smack round the bonce (it was allowed in those days). Touching the sides of a tent is the worst thing you can do when camping. Ever. Caused much hilarity with my sister's in-laws.
Woke in the middle of the night. As it's a camp site it was pitch black, thought I'd gone blind as I could see absolutely nothing and screamed. Caused much hilarity with my in-laws.
Had to listen to two 'neighbours' arguing due to one of them being able to hear everything the others were saying, and singing because the bastards had taken a guitar with them. Just like Nuts in May. Yes, really.
Decided it would be a good idea to go the pub at a place called Kirkstone Pass, one of the highest pubs in England. It's accessed by a notoriously steep road. Sister's father-in-law decided he would drive, he's not the world's greatest driver. I had my eyes shut most of the way, when I opened them, his false teeth, which he wasn't overly keen on wearing, were grinning up at me from the map pocket in the car door. The pub itself is like The Slaughtered Lamb off of An American Werewolf in London. Stuffed crows on every window ledge. Needless to say, the trip down was just as scary as on the way up. Made worse by my sister's father-in-law'sinsistence that we listen to his Jim Reeves tape. Gentleman Jim.
We had to take the tent down and pack up in the pouring rain.
I've never been camping again.
*Especially as it's since been used on the rather excellent Oscar-winning feature documentary One Day in September, a film about the Israeli hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics. The music accompanies footage of actual police photos taken of the carnage inside one of the helicopters that was blown up. I find it a scary but great track all at the same time.
