Month: August 2019

Hello Sweetie!

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Family

There’s a sweet shop in Tintagel. (I realise it’s not quite “there is a house in New Orleans”, but bear with me).

Tintagel’s an odd sort of place. It’s overwhelmingly a tourist haven, which is inevitable I suppose given its Cornishy, coastaly nature. The main street is a long winding affair, getting narrower and twistier as it gets nearer the coast, but it’s laid out in a pleasing fashion so that the half a dozen or so carparks which lead off, do so unobtrusively, and without overshadowing the shops and businesses they’re there to service. To recap then, in a slightly more concise manner, there is ample parking.

All in all, and especially if you’re “not from round these ‘ere parts” I would imagine it’s a pleasing holiday destination, and to be fair it’s done very well to carve itself an entire tourist niche off the back of an entirely fictitious character. (I hope that in debunking the whole ‘sword in the stone’ myth in such a brutal fashion I won’t find myself barred next time I try and get in there.) You can’t walk very far without coming across the Avalon this, or the Camelot that. Not to mention the King Arthur’s Arms, which among other things does a very good cooked breakfast. (Based on the one I had a fortnight ago, anyway, which was large enough to nearly finish me off rather than the other way around).

And there’s a sweet shop. Given the previous paragraph it would be an awesome segue if it was called something like Guinevere’s Nibbles or the Lancelot Lollipop Emporium. Alas, rather more prosaically (and in our household at least, sounding ever so slightly like a euphemism) it’s called the Kernow Fudge Kitchen.

It’s a bit misleading, in that they don’t just sell fudge, and in fact our attention was first drawn to it when my wife was given some of their Peanut Brittle, with which she was more than slightly impressed. (While she was eating it, there were certain noises coming from her end of the settee which I’d never heard before. (Or at least not vertically.))

Personally I can take or leave Brittle, and I don’t much care for Peanuts; but not being the sort of people to leave unexplored a potential new avenue of sweets, we went to see for ourselves – to find that the home-made fudge (hence the shop’s name) and the brittlised peanuts (hence the adults-only noises) are just the tip of a sugar-coated iceberg. All the time we were there, I didn’t glimpse even a hint of an oompa-loompah so can only assume that the young couple running the shop really are making it all themselves as they claim (and to be fair, the enormous granite slab laden with orange-flavoured hard boiled sweets pretty much settles the matter).

I’ve been a fan of sweets for as long as I can remember. In my youth, of course, it was still the era of the sweet cigarette, and its more classy cousin the liquorice pipe. There was also, although I appear to be the only person left alive to remember them, a product called Floral Gums which were like teeny-tiny, smooth-faced, jelly-sweets, slightly tacky and smelling of soap. They were (despite all the adjectives I’ve just flung at them) absolutely gorgeous.

My favourite, though, was probably the Fruit Gum, both in the standard tubular edition and in its special, cinema-only, shaped & boxed variation. For many years, I assumed that my personal pecking order (green, yellow, orange, red, with black as the best) was the same for everybody, but apparently not!

In fact, not only does my wife put green and yellow evenly-matched at the top of the heap, she actively dislikes the black ones. This is good news for me, of course, as whenever she has a packet of Fruit Gums/Fruit Pastilles/Opal Fruits her first action is to hive off the blackcurrant ones, so that I can humanely dispose of them for her.

She complains about it, especially when there is often a disproportionate number of black fruit pastilles in a packet.

She complains about it… but I think it’s a pretty sweet deal!

Deal or No Deal

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Brexit, Doctor Who, Little Bit Of Politics

I really wish I was going to spend 700 words moaning about Noel Edmonds.

Alas, it’s not the bearded one (well, not that bearded one) it’s just more bloody Brexit. Hopefully, when it’s all finished and we can finally sit down and do the whole boxset in one go, it won’t seem quite as rambly and all over the place. Maybe we’ll be able to see a clear narrative structure running through it. Heck, there might even be some characters we can actually warm to. Hopefully.

At the moment, though, that’s seeming very unlikely.

In this week’s twist, Jeremy Corbyn has come up with a bizarre plan, which involves him taking over as temporary Prime Minister. I certainly didn’t see that coming, although I’m reluctant to categorically label it as Brexit’s ‘jumping the shark’ moment. There’s always the very real danger that something even dafter might be just around the corner.

As far as I can see, his plan involves getting enough votes to push through a vote of no confidence in the new Prime Minister (as played by Boris Johnson of course) but for some reason that I can’t quite follow, on this occasion it won’t prompt a General Election (cue telecine insert of Brenda from Bristol exclaiming “What? Another one?!”) but will instead mean that Jeremy, along with a mixed bag of opponents-turned-allies, forms a caretaker government.

If I’m honest it reminds me of the penultimate episode of Matt Smith’s first year as Doctor Who, when the Daleks and Cybermen and all the other halfway decent costumes kicking around the BBC Wales costume department, all got together to sort the Doctor out once and for all. (If Boris pops up on the news next week wearing a fez, that will put the tin hat on it. As it were.)

All in all, Jeremy C’s character has been written very differently this season. In earlier runs, he very nearly won the General Election, was hugely popular with the young, I mean blimey, he was even ‘bigged-up’ at Glastonbury! This time round, he’s portrayed as a bumbling, ineffectual nobody and an anti-semite –  and has an obsessive delusion that he can become Prime Minister!

Meanwhile, from almost nowhere Jo Swinson has got her name above the titles (maybe she’s got a new agent). She’s keen on Corbyn’s idea, not so keen on Corbyn – her version of pretty much the same plan means a season finale with Ken Clarke cameoing as celebrity (sorry, I mean caretaker) Prime Minister. (I picture it as being very like William Shatner guesting in Boston Legal – hugely entertaining, utterly unpredictable, and perhaps not entirely politically correct.)

The main (possibly only) point of this proposed replacement government is to ensure there is not No Deal, which is all fine and dandy up to a point – but… Well… The alternative to ‘No Deal’ is surely, in the normal, grammatical way of things, ‘Deal’? Whatever its faults the EU has been commendably consistent in making it clear over the past nine months (I know, it feels like decades, sorry) that the deal as agreed is the only deal available.

It would be an awful (in every sense of the word ‘awful’) waste of time if it turns out that having ensured ‘No Deal’ their only possible alternative is to bring back the deal that Theresa May (you know, she was in it a lot last season) tried three, maybe four, times to get through Parliament. But as far as I can see (and to be fair, as Theresa May said in episode seven) it’s her deal or no deal. So if you don’t want no deal then… well, you can probably work out the rest of that for yourself.

Maybe what’ll happen is, that Theresa May will wake up on 31st October to discover that it was all a terrible dream, that the whole of the last season never happened, that she’s still Prime Minister, and that we’re ready to leave with her original deal all approved.

Mind you, if that means she’ll then be faced with David Cameron coming out of the shower – well, then she has my sympathies.

(Run End Titles)

Spud-I-Like

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Family

I’m having potatoes for tea.

I get slightly defensive about this, because my two significant others often mock me for it. (That is to say, my wife and daughter – do you really think I’d be writing about potatoes, if I had a wife AND a mistress on the go? It seems unlikely I’d find the time, or indeed the energy).

We’re having steak and chips in fact, but I’m swapping out chips for potatoes. Don’t worry, I’m not one of those mythical “didn’t even know milk comes from cows” sort of people, I do know that in essence the chip is just a potato. For all my fondness for the potato in all its many and varied forms, the chip is the exception that proves the rule and as such has never really won me over.

This being 2019 we’re using oven chips, naturally. I’m old enough to remember when the oven chip was a newbie on the market, a scandalously-convenient interloper. But that was forty years ago, and since then it’s put in the hard graft, it’s worked its way up, it’s expanded the range to include crinkle cut, long ‘n’ skinny, short ‘n’ stout. Not to mention working its way into our hearts (well, our ears anyway) with such memorable advertising campaigns as “will it be onions, fried onion rings?” – to the tune, of course, of Doris Day’s Que Sera Sera.

I realise that the previous paragraph reads like the random utterances of a bewildered mind – but my point is, that the oven chip is so ubiquitous that it should surely now be considered the de facto version of the chip; while ye olde “peel ‘n’ chop ‘n’ deep-fry your own potato” method has been consigned to the artisan or the socially-ambitious.

So though my daughter and wife are having chips, I am having boiled potatoes. (I don’t know what my mistress is having, as I’m not cooking for her, plus it’s difficult to follow the eating habits of non-existent people.) They often laugh at my dedicated adherence to the potato – my daughter would opt for rice or pasta every time over the potato, and in fact will only ever consider eating one if it’s roasted (and then only if it’s sufficiently crispy).

She far prefers pasta, to the point of coming back from work the other day with a tub full of some green pasta/pesto combination. My wife raved over it too, but I’m afraid pasta is to me generally a slimy, chewy, unsatisying affair, so I declined her invitation to try it. Maybe I’ve just not had enough pasta to have yet encountered it properly cooked, but what I have had has pretty much set the seal on my already minimal lack of adventure in that regard.

Meanwhile my wife will occasionally mention, rather mockingly, that I had never even eaten rice until I met her. This is perfectly true, and actually, other than the packet that came with a Vesta Curry in the late-70s, I’d never even seen rice until I met her. I’ve eaten plenty of it since we met, and I don’t mind it but… well, it’s hardly what you’d call a taste explosion now is it?

So I continue to wave the flag for the spud, far more versatile than pasta or rice (and don’t even get me started on couscous, of which the most enjoyable part by far is the catchy name). You can boil it, you can mash it, you can roast it – if you really want to, you can even peel ‘n’ chop ‘n’ deep-fry it to make chips. The potato is gloriously accommodating too, an indispensable aid to the amateur cook, because once they’re boiled they’ll happily stay on the hob ticking over until everything else is ready. Even on those rare occasions when they let you down and go all stringy, well, lob in some butter and mash them up and you’re good to go.

And that’s about it really. I could say a lot, lot more on the good old-fashioned spud but, well, it’s nearly time for tea and my potatoes are about done.

Gone Too Soon

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, Carlisle, Childhood

I knew this girl at Primary School.

No, that’s not quite true. She was in my year but not in my class; so I suppose I knew of her rather than knew her.

I went to Primary School in the late-seventies, which was a time before the rise of fake tans and the invention of skin cancer, when we thought a Vesta curry was a mark of the exotic, and when going abroad for the holidays was a sign of affluence.

This girl, she certainly went abroad for her holidays, and would return each September sporting a beautiful deep tan. Back then there was no downside to that, it was a sign of health and wealth. There was a hint of Italian in her surname, so maybe it wasn’t money but family that allowed her to go overseas each year. But my memory is that the names bandied about were Majorca and Tenerife, holiday resorts rather than ancestral seats. Regardless, as I say, the beginning of each new school year would see her gorgeously-tanned for the first couple of weeks of term.

There were of course some who would lord that sort of thing over the rest of us, flaunting their good-fortune. There were certainly one or two such spoilt brats in our year, but I don’t recall ever hearing that she was one. By all accounts, or at least as far as my recollection of them goes, she was bright, friendly, well-liked, and a good little pupil.

And for whatever reason, for years afterwards, whenever as occasionally happens the conversation turned to the days when having a deep tan wasn’t considered unhealthy, I would cite her as an example.

This week, the combination of the start of the school holidays, some bright sunny weather, and a passing mention of Tenerife on the radio, prompted the thought of Googling her. Not in a stalkerish fashion, just to see if I could find out what she’s gone on to do in the nearly forty years since we left Primary School.

She died in 2001.

Her name was so distinctive, and the details of location and age so correct, that it has to be the same girl. Plus the search brought up a picture, similar enough to my faded memory of how she looked at ten to be the same person.

My search also brought up reference to a foundation that bears her name, offering support to those with mental health difficulties; and it produced results that referred to her death in a tragic rail accident… And I’m sad to say it soon became obvious how  those dots joined up

It’s odd. I only ever really knew her as a name and a tan. I knew who she was but can’t off-hand recall ever even speaking to her. I think she was in the school choir at the same time as me, but even that I can’t be sure of all these years later. Yet to discover she was dead at thirty has taken me aback.

On the one hand she and I are contemporaries, in 1982 we were the same age. On the other hand, I’m now forty-eight, I’m a whole generation older than she ever got to be. The (let’s be clear) suicide of a young woman, the thought of that desperation and that final awful act, is very sobering.

I’ve had my own moments, and although for me the response ended up more Reggie Perrin than Tony Hancock, nevertheless the fleeting thought was there. All barriers gone, a moment where my usual pragmatic anchors of “how will we pay the gas bill?” and “what will people say?” had no influence on me whatsoever.

Where I was lucky, where the sheer fluke of being offered a lift home was enough to carry the day, that girl was not. Thirty is no age at all and so, without claiming for a moment that I’ve been struck by an unbearable grief, nevertheless I’ve found myself thinking about her again and again these past few days.

And that’s about it, really. I’ve no conclusion, certainly no answers. Just a moment of remembrance, for a girl I never knew.