A Visit to Green Grandad, or a Fish Supper in ...

The old man is sitting down to a fish supper: fish and chips, a saveloy, three gherkins and a pickled onion; with a cup of sergeant major tea. The fish supper is still on its newspaper - yesterday's Evening Standard. The tea is well, you know, a half pint tin mug full of a milky amber liquid and a spoon in it, that surfaces every so often like a diver rising for air... because the amount of sugar in it has changed it to a viscous solid. it's on a paper doily. By the side of the tin mug is an open tin, full of Old Holborn Ready Rub and a packet of Rizla papers in a natty little compartment. The lid has a rolling machine with one in the slot; the battered old prewar enamel ashtray has a half-smoked cigarette in it, brought in from a quiet puff in the outside khazi*, listening to the bees in the loganberry trellis. Besides this is a an older silver sixpenny piece.

*This was a strange place where wartime habits still survived, he had a special toilet roll he would hand visitors. It was an Izal... a special one impregnated with disinfectant and made from shiny paper. It was completely unabsorbent. I used to use some of granddad's carefully torn up Evening Standards** (thrifty, that's what he was, thrifty). They might leave week old news on my bottom, but at least they were marginally absorbent. The smell was incredible; in the height of Summer a machete would have been useful to fight your way in through the miasma and the runners from the loganberries. ("I grew those from canes sent all the way from Scotland; Logan's a Scottish name, boy") Once in there, the many layered olfactory experience was devastating for a young boy. I reckon if we'd lived closer and visited more often I would have ended up with the lung capacity of a Pacific island pearl diver. Breath in there? Are you kidding? It would be as easy as breathing on Venus...

**When green grandad died (so named after the colour of his front door - it is now blue [Thanks Google Earth] but next door's is still pink and you can guess that that was my maternal 'pink' grandfather's house...)  Ah, where was I? When he died, I had this idea that his body would be left to the Evening Standard, his body mummified and his backside peeled with one of those cheese slicers. Old staffers would gather round the thin layers, formaldehyde dripping from them, reminiscing over old stories..

***This post has been brought to you at the request of Destry54 blame him!