Where Did It All Go Right? (22 page)

Where
this
started I do not know, but for a time in the mid-Seventies, I developed a habit of getting up before anybody else, coming downstairs and setting the table, like the breakfast fairy. Extending my own role in The Ritual, I would lay the tablecloth, put down the wicker mats, set out all the bowls
¹⁸
and cutlery and
stand
up the cereal boxes in the middle (Weetabix and Corn Flakes for them, Frosties and Sugar Smacks for us). If I’d been allowed to I’m sure I would have ironed Dad’s
Telegraph
and boiled the milk, but I was only insured for the acoustic stuff. What I hoped to gain from this butler act – every morning – is unclear. Credits? Maybe I was just being nice. For what we are about to receive – crusts off, taste disguised by treacle – may the Lord make us truly thankful, amen.

It was nonetheless advanced and prescient domestic behaviour. I am now 37; as old as my dad was in 1978 when I was 13 – and guess what? – I get up before anybody else each morning, come downstairs, set the table, empty the dishwasher, replenish the cats’ bowls, top up the bird feeders, set out the cups, get out the teabags, fill the kettle, lay out my vitamins and fillet the
Guardian
, placing the unwanted sections in the recycling …

The world falls apart but some things stay in place.
¹⁹

So what has changed, apart from the custard tarts? I have. I am now an adult and as such I eat my greens but it’s a little more extreme than that. It’s more than gammon and pineapple. I no longer eat like a sinner, I eat like a saint. My body is a proverbial temple, whereas once, in the decade that forgot taste, it was a chemical toilet. There’s no processed food in
our
house, beyond a jar of mayonnaise and some tinned tomatoes; it’s organic everything, wholefood surprise, wheat-free this and gluten-free that, a small pharmacy of vitamins and supplements, herbal infusions, sunflower seeds, oat milk, tofu yogurt and vegetables that I have to look up in a book.
²⁰
It’s a harvest festival every day, and I know the first names of the farmers who grow it all.

Thinking about this nutritional U-turn, it’s more like penance, as though I’m eating my way backward until I reach my misspent, miseaten youth. I’m eating for two now: the grown-up me and the Supermousse me, trying to fortify us both before the carcinogens come knocking. While other areas of my life are a continuation of
my
childhood, the way I eat now is an exercise in damage limitation, an attempt to rectify. Here’s where I start paying: in swede.

Oh, I make a pie occasionally, not treacle or shepherd’s, but fruit. (
What’s in a fruit pie that you don’t like?
) In fact, I made one for Mum and Dad only the other week,
²¹
heating it through at their house, turning the tables at last: their kitchen smelt of
my
home cooking. It was nice to put something back. We ate it all, and they were grateful and we sat back, sated. And here’s the bombshell:
my
fruit pie was made with not a single grain of sugar. That’s my secret non-ingredient.

Revenge – upon the decade, not upon Mum and Dad – is a dish best served at dinnertime.

1.
Rise & Shine was powdered orange juice, presumably straight out of the Apollo mission, yet advertised – and in our house, embraced – as the height of culinary sophistication. Just empty the contents of the sachet into a pint of water in a yellow Tupperware jug, stir, et
voilà
! Real orange juice which you only drank at breakfast. The best part is, we considered it exotic and special because you didn’t have to dilute it.

2.
One assumes she left it. Foodcrime!

3.
Apparently I ate carrots when I was very little, too young to know where they came from. With knowledge came aversion.

4.
By vegetables, I mean something other than potatoes. When mashed, roasted, fried – or on special occasions mashed
and
fried – we considered potatoes honorary processed food.

5.
One of the original line-up on much-loved LWT impressions show
Who Do You Do?
(1972–76). See also: Freddie Starr, Faith Brown, Roger Kitter, Aiden J Harvey, Peter Goodright, Johnny More.

6.
E120, a Seventies classic: cochineal, red food colouring sourced from pregnant Central American beetles
Dactilopius coccus
. Registered charity the Hyperactive Children’s Support Group (formed in 1977) recommends E120 is excluded from children’s diets. Found, still, in alcoholic drinks, cheddar, pie fillings, biscuits, sweets and the rest.

7.
The raison
d’être
of these chocolate bars was that they were really hard to eat. The Texan dude in the animated adverts used his to duck a firing squad – it took so long to chew his way through the nougat, the Mexicans went to sleep. ‘A man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew.’? Gary Cooper died for these people.

8.
Unwieldy proto-Monster Munch ‘corn snacks’ in the shape of rockets and UFOs. About four in a bag.

9.
I’d never encountered a fruitless, flavourless yogurt before. The whole
point
of a yogurt was the bits of fruit in it. Ask any of those skiers.

10.
My ‘girlfriend’ at the time.

11.
‘There’s no shame in being a pariah,’ as Marge Simpson once said.

12.
I was once at the house of some friends of Nan Mabel and Pap Reg where I was offered a ‘toffee’ by the host. I took it with glee, only to find on chewing that it was hollow and contained some gooey substance I wasn’t familiar with (jam?). I spat it out. Never get out of the boat, as Chef (Frederic Forrest) advises in
Apocalypse Now
. And he’s a
saucier
. On my first visit to an authentic diner in New York, about ten years after the Paul Bush spaghetti incident, I confidently ordered a lox bagel, unaware that lox is Yiddish for smoked salmon. I was a strict no-fish vegetarian at the time and, having laboriously extracted vast folds of salmon from my plate, I ended up eating the decorative salad leaves round the edge I was so hungry. In Chicago, almost ten years after that and no longer a veggie, I ordered a ‘soft shell crab sandwich’ and was dismayed to find three whole crabs under my bread. In their shells. They might as well have been scurrying about among the onions. The point is this: I never let my companions know that I was surprised by what I’d been served up, and gamely tucked in. We never grow up. (I left half of that too – my eyes were bigger than my belly.)

13.
I was eventually taught how to eat vegetables by a girlfriend in the mid-Eighties. Indian food came in 1988, after which I started to travel for my job and the world became my oyster – or at least my soft shell crab.

14.
This is quite shocking. If it’s as late as 1983, Simon is on the verge of joining the Royal Anglian Regiment proper, and yet he is still refusing his greens (even
I
ate fruit). The army would make an omnivore of him. Or would it? For a couple of years, before and after joining up, Simon kept a diary. In 1983, just prior, he helpfully compiled a ‘Food Chart’ which tells us all we need to know. It reads thus:

1
Mr Men Fruit Gums

2
ET biscuits

3
Twiglets

4
Choc éclairs

5
Mars bars

15.
Forgive me the comparison. ‘Freedom Train’ by Langston Hughes (‘the Poet Laureate of Harlem’), written in 1947, imposing a civil rights agenda on to the US government locomotive of the same name.

16.
As teenagers, my friend Paul Garner and I made an entire joke dinner – with Mum’s weary permission – by adding lurid bottled colours to various foodstuffs and presenting them on a plate to be photographed with my new Instamatic camera. I have the photo here: the dish seems to comprise a potato dyed green, two types of slop (apple sauce? desiccated coconut?) dyed green, and some liquid dyed red, acting as a bright gravy. Chocolate sauce completes the plate, along with a green drink, which must be milk, in a wine glass and possibly a portion of trifle in a frilly paper case, also dyed green. Paul and I experimented by eating some of it, and the alimentary results were suitably vivid. I like to think of this meal as a spiritual fulfilment of the aborted Winnie the Pooh food painting.

17.
Huge things, the size of conkers, advertised by cartoon gold prospector Klondike Pete and his mule. I think they gave away something desperately desirable when they first launched, like stickers or transfers. But the penance was too great.

18.
We ate, and I mean all of us, from plastic bowls. Made from some wonder polymer developed during the space race, you could bounce them off the walls, drive a car over them. They’d come as part of a picnic set and somehow found their way into kitchen circulation. It was an unbreakable decade.

19.
‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’ by Billy Bragg (1986): ‘When the world falls apart, some things stay in place/Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.’

20.
A Gourmet’s Book of Vegetables
by Louise Steele.

21.
Apple, pear, cherry and redcurrant. Mr Ambassador, you are spoiling us!

eight

Joy Rides

I’m allowed to get my vest wet!

Simon Collins, Black Rock Sands, North Wales (1975)

OH, HOW WE
dreaded going on holiday. A cloud of misery hung over our heads for weeks beforehand. It was worse than having a dentist’s appointment or an exam. We used to feel sick just thinking about it. Even the approaching end of term (‘We break up, we break down, we don’t care if the school falls down etc.’) was tainted with a sense of doom and gloom.

It wasn’t the holiday itself, you understand – that was a guaranteed two weeks of fun, fresh air and free gifts – it was the journey from Northampton to North Wales. Six hours it took us in those dark days before bypasses and Happy Eaters: two junctions north up the M1 then along the M6 to Telford where we were forced back on to soul-destroying A-roads for the rest of our grey odyssey, via Shrewsbury, Oswestry and Chirk; a faint cheer from within Dad’s Viva as we passed the ‘Welcome to Wales’ sign on the A5, the traditional leg-stretching stop-off at a layby in Llangollen, then we pushed on into Snowdonia on the A494 past the glinting Bala Lake and towards Trawsfynydd via the even more windy A4212; triumphantly, we passed through the mental checkpoint of Porthmadog and rattled down the Lleyn Peninsula past Llanystumdwy to Pwllheli – just in time for breakfast. Sorry, did I not mention we used to set off at 3 a.m.?

A six-hour car journey would test the patience and digestive
stamina
of any kid, but having to be turfed out of bed at 2.30 a.m. when it was dark and cold and
wrong
was never going to start the holiday with a smile. You see, the Collins family always went to Wales on Day One of the school holidays, as if it were a race – this meant we were hitting the M1, M6 and A5 at
exactly the same time
as every other unimaginative family with a roof rack in the country. Thus, the only way to ‘avoid the traffic’ (every dad’s dream) was to set out at such an ungodly hour that we only met lorries along the way. Lorries, and hundreds of other families with roof racks who’d had precisely the same idea.

The first year we went to Wales – 1972, when Melissa was still a baby – we ran slap bang into a carnival at Porthmadog, which must have doubled our already swollen journey time, and I’m sure Dad vowed there and then, gridlocked between floats, clowns and people in national dress, to leave a bit earlier next year.

Thus, 3 a.m. became our most extreme start time, although in later years it relaxed to 4 a.m. and even 5.30 a.m. Either way, the central heating would be off – I always remember my teeth physically chattering, which was at least good training for the fortnight to come – and we would have to whisper and creep about so as not to disturb Jean and Geoff and the kids next door, adding to the stark, Colditz-like unreality of the situation. In a game attempt to reduce the misery of this midnight flit, Mum and Dad would buy us a holiday special to read and keep it from us until the start of the journey, as an incentive not to dread the whole thing. Dad would tantalisingly place our holiday specials – a
Frankie Stein
and a
Battle
, let’s say – on the back shelf of the car while loading up the night before, which meant we could look out of the kitchen window and see them, beckoning us. Did this trick make setting out on the miserable six-hour journey any better? Of course not. It was pitch black at 3 a.m. and we could only make out the pages by the yellow lights of the motorway moving across the comics – massively frustrating, and of course guaranteed to bring on motion sickness before Telford.

These days families travel in minibus-sized ‘people carriers’ with bags of ergonomically designed leg-room and luggage space. The 1970s Vauxhall Viva, though a family car, was very much economy class. A people crusher. Shoehorn three kids in the back,
including
one in a strap-in baby seat, and you’ve barely got enough room to stash the plastic potty and the I-Spy books. The potty was for throwing up in, although I don’t recall any of us ever doing anything so neat with our unwanted guts.

Travel sickness blighted our every car journey. One out of the three of us was sick every time Dad drove more than 500 yards.
¹
On major journeys – Wales, Yarmouth, Ilfracombe, Blackpool, Weymouth – Mum and Dad would carry a big bottle of water in the boot for the express purpose of wiping our inevitable sick off the upholstery. Mum recalls with a shudder the time Simon and I vomited in stereo, one out of the driver’s side window, the other out of the passenger side. I can only hope that it looked spectacular to the driver behind us, like a display by the Red Arrows perhaps.