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!

The Concert - Storyvillette

A sad tale from my tweenies (20-29):  Well, I had got involved with this lass from Yorkshire... she was so, so pretty. Not sexy, but delicately pretty, the sort of looks where she was so fragile looking, like a fine china vase... She was living on a farm in the dales with a guy who beat her. I kid you not. I was not happy, we gradually got closer whilst I tried to provide advice. You might have gathered by now that my natural inclination is to help people. And when they're very pretty, well...

I offered to come and intercede with the guy, but apparently she was frightened he'd shoot me (he had a 12-bore shotgun), I said I was scared, but what he was doing was unspeakable and I was happy to remonstrate with him. But even so I was careful to try not to get too involved, but her letters got, frankly much more interested than they should have been. So I moved out of my house share (she couldn't bear to be with other house-sharers) and into a flat I could barely afford. But the lass had various commitments which she couldn't... like her horses, you guessed... I was a romantic fool, Galahad to the rescue...

She had always loved Bob Dylan, so I booked a room in the Wembley Hilton for two nights, a reservation in the resto there and bought tickets to the Bob Dylan concert at Wembley Stadium. I was not particularly a fan but Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds were one of the support acts (and they were awesome). What I hadn't realised was that the door opened at 11.00 a.m. with the supports and that it was 8 before Saint Bob turned up. There were no seats, just the concrete of the stands...   The guys on the terraces above having been drinking and god knows what else above us, decided it would be cool to relieve themselves on the steps before them and watch it trickle down past and through those sitting down on the concrete levels nearer the pitch... that was not the best day of my life... made worse by the fact that the racket from the people around overwhelmed the sound system, and it was substandard anyway.  With the screaming, we could not. hear. a. single. word. Dylan. sang. At this point, having missed our dinner reservation... I said we had to leave.

When we got back to the hotel room, the pain in my bottom (and hers) from the concrete and the hours of miserable sitting had left it's mark; even her shapely bottom had bruises, I had massive black bruises on my buttocks. No nooky, no romance, just physical pain and despair. In her case of a wasted weekend and mine, for the lack of maturity for not saying earlier, this is a waste of time. Oh. And it was two months disposable income... Even now it makes me wince; the thick end of £500.

Piquant peppers

Normally I'd do a full ingredients breakdown, but it's not really necessary as this is a really simply recipe.  You'll need a medium-small flat roasting pan.  Slice a large onion (enough to layer a single layer on the floor of the pan), sprinkle a tbsp of Olive Oil, then 1/2 tsp of ground Cumin, 1/2 tsp of ground Coriander.

Take 3 bell peppers, de-seed them and cut them into thin lengthwise strips and lay them evenly on the onion.  Then sprinkle a tsp of Balsamic vinegar, a tsp of Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire Sauce and a tbsp of Olive Oil on that, grind a goodly amount of black pepper over this.  Then put a couple of layers of foil across the pan so that it is effectively sealed.  Put this into the middle of an oven on it's lowest setting.  On mine it's called Miser...  No comments, please! for about 3 hours.  Then after that loosen the foil (make sure the roasting tray is on a bigger tray), put the trays on the top shelf and turn the gas up to GM8 for about 20-30 minutes.

You can serve it hot or put the contents into an air-tight jar and use it effectively as a condiment or pickle.  I love this; minimum of effort but a really versatile result.

What is a barmaid?

Just a question. Are there any real barmaids left? I mean the type who was very well-endowed who could carefully dispose of the bounteous nature of her assets to allow the pulling of a full pint, whilst mysteriously a third hand would bat away any lecherous advances whilst; smiling genially and discussing Irish literature with a fourth patron? She would also be able to drink any bloke under the table, cheer up anyone who had been dumped by a would-be date, without seeming to want to be a stand-in? I thought not. Kate, from the early 70s Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street, must be a granny now, but by the gods us young blokes lusted after her, would have defended her and in no small measure revered her as the epitome of the barmaid. Her counterpart, was the urbane, well-dressed but often fractious and very gay, Ray. He catered for the Bloomsbury crowd and their antecedents with real style and panache. So camp and so courageous in those less understanding times that even us straight blokes wanted to give him a big hug.

About then, I made it a point of honour on a Monday (a regular day off, in lieu of Saturday) to set off from Loughton, in Essex, and then travel only by bus and foot to the Lamb, having lunch there with a very good friend and a quick spag bol at the resto in the Sicilian Parade, which is still there! I then got back on the buses to travel all the way to Staines. This was a very, very long journey by the then London Transport.  This plan only failed once, when the driver and conductor of the 117, thinking that there was no-one on board, turned round and went back to Hammersmith with one sterterously snoring drunkard on the top deck. But Kate and her impossible talents, and sunny good humour remain in my memory forever...   There is something really quite magical about a good barmaid.

Why "Sorrow"?

I have been, in a sense, writing this ever since I heard Rachel Luttrell's death song in Stargate Atlantis.  I don't share my feelings easily, unless I think that it might help someone else.  There is no shame in being helpless, there is no guilt in not doing what you feel is, at least in one sense, a moral imperative.  And in some senses, your grief must have a voice and that is what Teyla gave to me at a very, very dark time.

Sorrow

I miss and grieve for my mother.  I still do, five years after her death; in some senses, ten years after.  Fifteen years ago she started to exhibit the early signs of senile dementia.  I started to miss her then; about two years after that she stopped solving the Telegraph crossword on her own; three years after that she stopped trying to solve it.  At that point I knew what hadn't been said, that her brain was silently destroying itself, that she was effectively passing into shadow and distress.  Inevitably, she was going.  The pain of this is like a knife in my heart, even now.  Nine years ago, when my then wife was not in the room, she simply looked at me and said "I know I'm repeating myself, but if I'm not me any more; if it gets worse, please make sure I don't just carry on."

I am still unbearably upset by that, the true measure of helplessness is when someone you love asks you to do something you know you can't do.  Even so, I felt I should do it for her - I wrestled with this, in the dark of the night.  When, three years before she died, I came to visit and she had wandered out of the house leaving the front door open; I knew it was time.  But although I found her and brought her back I had someone much younger with me, so there was no opportunity.  There is something about age and appreciation of mortality which only age can bring.  Her time had come.  I knew it, and what was much worse, so did she in her lucid moments.  But then we had to get her into a care home.  I am still in a part of me, ashamed that I could not kill her, bring her long long suffering to an end.  You can judge me or not, as you please.  But I still miss that very bright, highly intelligent cantankerous old bitch.  She was my Mum.

Time is flying

The bluebells have been and gone and the poppies are now gathering pace.

This is just a quick post to give you all (if anyone is still reading!) a quick grovel; my spare time is spent on ephemeral activities, mainly to take my mind off my imminent redundancy.  I am and have been working really hard on finalising the accounts, closing down the office and all the consequent transfers and notifications.  The transfer is to my erstwhile boss's house and at the end of June I will be unemployed.  This is not immediately a problem, as I have rainy day money, but it is a long-term concern, because at 61 it will be really difficult to gain further employment (even for a bloke of my calibre!).  The worst of it is that all this hard work feels, if I may use a grim simile, like digging my own grave!  Anyway, apologies all...