On Saturday morning I climbed the apple tree at the bottom of the garden, discovering gravity as a barrage of golden, not quite so delicious, fell on my head and almost knocked me off the kitchen chair I was using for a leg up. I then went into the house and steeped several kilos of them in four litres of Sainsbury's Basics Cider - delivered the day before to the mortification of my daughters who feared the driver would imagine they had bought it for a Notting Hill Carnival let's-get-wasted party - whereas their methods of inebriation are, apparently, a little more sophisticated.
'Oh yeah, it's my mum's,' as an explanation, didn't really improve the situation.
Undeterred I poured the mixture into the largest saucepan I own - big enough to boil a small baby (how I managed to resist that idea back in the day, I'm not sure), with several cinnamon sticks brought back from Grenada by my friend Kenrick, and turned up the heat for the hour it took to reduce them to mush. Then the real fun began. Out came my Williams and Sonoma tomato pulper, and into the funnel went the squished apples - cores spat out from one orifice and a river of fragrant apple sauce pouring out of the other - all over the worktop, completely missing the bowl.
Add 350 grams of sugar for every 500 grams of apples, says Sybil Kapoor. But I only had 700 grams of granulated heroin, I mean Silver Spoon, and I had three kilos of apple sauce. So I improvised - maple syrup, molasses, some brick hard demerera, and when I felt the mixture was sweet enough, I brought it to the boil as instructed, put on a pair of oven gloves ('protect your arms,' says Sybil) and stirred for twenty five minutes.
My eldest daughter appeared in her pyjamas at around 11 am and found me there - long hippy dress from Oxfam, her old school apron with her name embroidered on it, and a baseball cap for the Boston Celtics, two huge blue oven gloves and a pan the size of saturn, bubbling and spewing molten apple sauce that turned a dark, hazelnut brown as it cooked.
She looked at the wreckage of the kitchen - I was also making apricot puree and Arabic milk pudding and cheese and potato borek - and there were plates piled into pyramids in the sink and half assembled dishes scattered over the surfaces.
'What the f*** are you doing?' She muttered, wiping sleep out of her eyes, her hair awry (we all have a lot of hair - it's like the land that conditioner forgot in our house at the moment.)
'Cooking,' I said, somewhat unnecessarily, I thought. 'I'm making apple jelly from the apples in the garden. It's fantastic. I feel like the Amish.'
'Yeah, big on baseball caps, the Amish,' she said, disappearing seamlessly out of the door and retreating back to her bedroom where she hid for the rest of the day.
I was miffed. I am woman, see me preserve. From the land. Grown by my very own hands. Sod it - this is the stuff of Channel 4 primetime telly. Okay, so Nigella puts lipstick on, as well as underwear, and she has people off camera to do the clearing up, and she wears little high heel slippers with marabou feathers, not flip flops. But come on.
I stirred and stirred and stirred. I sterilized containers. I washed up. I made pies. I arranged my moulds on the kitchen table and, after both hands had lost all feeling and developed RSI, I poured out my preserves where they gelled instantly. I felt like Diane Keaton in that film where she moves to Vermont and makes baby food.
I waited for the Emanuel Gospel Choir to burst into a spiritual but instead all I heard was the drip of the tap. I made do with Laura Veirs instead, cut the jelly into squares and wrapped them up in greaseproof paper, drawing the label in my head and seeing it on the shelves at Carluccio's.
Daughter came back, sniffed and asked if she could put on some music that didn't sound like the woodcutter was dead.
'Praise my apple jelly,' I entreated.
She declined.
Skip forward two days.
Lukewarm has been pacing in the kitchen since the bowl of cereal I grudgingly allowed him at dawn, waiting for it to be time to eat. Eldest daughter has made foul medames and baba ganoush. There's humous, and boreq, and rice pudding sprinkled with almonds and ginger and a layer of apricot custard. There's crispy arabic bread with thyme and halloumi. There's also a glistening wedge of Old English Apple Cheese, straight from the Google annals of the Sunday Times.
At noon the starter's pistol goes off as Nel arrives for brunch. The Carnival is groaning like a convoy of supertankers with the toothache on Ladbroke Grove, the base a pulse of pain, and underneath the angry drone of the police helicopters in our garden, plates are filled with gorgeous food.
Nel is impressed with my jelly making enterprise which I tell her I made from scratch.
'From scratch?'
'Yep - picked the apples myself.'
'How long did it take you?'
'Oh about three hours'.
'You must try some.' I urge Lukewarm, spreading a little of it on to a slice of manchego and handing it to him.
'Yeah,' he says. 'It's good.'
I wait for more.
He chews.
'What do you do with it?'
'Eat it on cheese.'
'And?'
'That's about it.'
'Oh. It tastes just like - erm - well - apples.'
And, it's true. Three hours, two pots, 2nd degree burns and a piece of $50 plastic kit imported from the States, and it turns out that if you boil apples in cider what you get, in the end, is just that:
...apples.
I have two kilos of it, if anyone's interested.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Fishnets
I take the chicken out of the oven where it's been roasting and set it on the counter.
Mustard, I think, perversely, as I know it's going to be like eating a washcloth despite the herbs and garlic and apricots I've stuffed it with. And so I reach into the cupboard crammed haphazardly with condiments thanks to my heedless kids and - whack - out falls a bottle of Fish Sauce which smashes on the hob, shatters into a million pieces and drenches me, my silk dress, and the floor (that I just cleaned, along with the rest of the kitchen when I came home to find it messed up, despite or rather, because my daughter being on school holidays). I'm awash with the scent of putrefied fish.
Darn and double darn. I peel off the dress. First time I've worn it and now it's gone straight into the washing machine on a cold cycle. My legs and stomach are still distinctly fishy. The floor is a sea of dead fish with shards of glass floating in it. I'm also barefoot. I start swabbing and knock over all the breadboard, which in a domino effect, knocks over the expensive olive oil that I keep mostly for show, which glugs and disgorges £25 a litre Sicilian lemon oil in a huge spreading slick that then drips on to the floor to mingle with the fish sauce.
Vinaigrette.
There's glass in the cloth. Glass in the sink. Glass on the floor. At least one sliver in the sole of my foot. I can't use the dustpan without it stinking of fermenting fish and so I pick little bits out, sticky and unctious, one fragment at a time. And I still reek of fish. The chicken is cooling and turning to string. The salad is wilting. The avocado has gone as brown as my feet.
I get on my knees and soak up cloth after cloth full of the pungent, pongy liquid.
Eventually, however, the place is mopped up, if still stinky, and I wash myself down with a flannel and throw it into the machine, add detergent and turn my attention, finally, to my unappetising supper. I've lost my appetite somewhat. And I still didn't find the mustard. A plate in one hand. A glass of fish tainted water in the other, I go back into the sitting room just as the No 7 bus idles on the street beside the closed bottom shutters, and as I stand in the middle of the floor, making my entrance, I glance up I see the entire top deck glancing back at me.
It's only then, with no free hands, that I realise I am still in my Luke influenced underwear from which various parts sit attentively at 3.15 (yeah I'm old but we're not at twenty past eight yet) like a dalek in exterminate mode. Billingsgate in Lingerie
I just pray nobody has a camera phone.
Mustard, I think, perversely, as I know it's going to be like eating a washcloth despite the herbs and garlic and apricots I've stuffed it with. And so I reach into the cupboard crammed haphazardly with condiments thanks to my heedless kids and - whack - out falls a bottle of Fish Sauce which smashes on the hob, shatters into a million pieces and drenches me, my silk dress, and the floor (that I just cleaned, along with the rest of the kitchen when I came home to find it messed up, despite or rather, because my daughter being on school holidays). I'm awash with the scent of putrefied fish.
Darn and double darn. I peel off the dress. First time I've worn it and now it's gone straight into the washing machine on a cold cycle. My legs and stomach are still distinctly fishy. The floor is a sea of dead fish with shards of glass floating in it. I'm also barefoot. I start swabbing and knock over all the breadboard, which in a domino effect, knocks over the expensive olive oil that I keep mostly for show, which glugs and disgorges £25 a litre Sicilian lemon oil in a huge spreading slick that then drips on to the floor to mingle with the fish sauce.
Vinaigrette.
There's glass in the cloth. Glass in the sink. Glass on the floor. At least one sliver in the sole of my foot. I can't use the dustpan without it stinking of fermenting fish and so I pick little bits out, sticky and unctious, one fragment at a time. And I still reek of fish. The chicken is cooling and turning to string. The salad is wilting. The avocado has gone as brown as my feet.
I get on my knees and soak up cloth after cloth full of the pungent, pongy liquid.
Eventually, however, the place is mopped up, if still stinky, and I wash myself down with a flannel and throw it into the machine, add detergent and turn my attention, finally, to my unappetising supper. I've lost my appetite somewhat. And I still didn't find the mustard. A plate in one hand. A glass of fish tainted water in the other, I go back into the sitting room just as the No 7 bus idles on the street beside the closed bottom shutters, and as I stand in the middle of the floor, making my entrance, I glance up I see the entire top deck glancing back at me.
It's only then, with no free hands, that I realise I am still in my Luke influenced underwear from which various parts sit attentively at 3.15 (yeah I'm old but we're not at twenty past eight yet) like a dalek in exterminate mode. Billingsgate in Lingerie
I just pray nobody has a camera phone.
No Virgin
In the post Virgin have sent me a new, what I feel sure is inaccurately named, smart card. I follow the instructions which, predictably on step 3, fails and the television freezes. I wait the requisite 20 minutes and call the helpline. Listen to two messages that have absolutely nothing to do with me since I don't want HD channels or live in Warrington where the internet is down but where I'm assured there will be an update at six pm. It's now six thirty. I then press two, then three, then one, then two, two, two, two and hold. And hold. And hold.
Eventually I am connected to a call centre outside Glasgow where my accent twin takes me through all the things I've already done on her script, then resends a new signal, and after ten minutes of waiting for things to reboot, once again I now have 300 channels of rubbish on a television set I rarely switch on.
This sets me thinking. Why am I keeping all these services I don't use and so I ask to be transferred to someone who can help me tailor my package. More lengthy music, and a chap called Dan comes on the line who seems to be somewhere in the Midlands. His voice is a monotone. I explain that I want to cancel my V+ service that never once in the two years I've had it, has worked, my second telephone line which doesn't even have a phone plugged into it, and downgrade my channels to the minimum they offer.
He can do that. However it will cost me £44 per month while I'm currently paying £35. Apparently I get a discount on the package. That's ridiculous, I say. You're telling me that for a severely curtailed service it will cost me more money?
Yes.
Okay then I'll just cancel the whole thing.
I'm bluffing but I know they have to try to keep your business and I want to see if he'll come back with another offer.
You can't. You're not the account holder.
I am the account holder. Check your records. I have full authority to change and amend this account.
No, only the account holder can cancel.
We repeat this dialogue into about the twenty seventh circle of hell before I ask to speak to his supervisor.
I hang on for three songs, one of which is Pink and not a favourite. Not keen on Paolo Nuttini either.
He comes back and tells me that he's just spoken to his supervisor and been informed that the policy has changed and I can now cancel the account if I wish. No apology. No regret.
Are you now the supervisor?
No, I just spoke to her and she... The man is a tape machine.
I interrupt and remind him that I asked to speak to his supervisor and would still like to do so.
Another play of Paolo Nuttini (same one) and on comes a girl. Are you sure you want to cancel? She asks.
I repeat that nobody watches the television and so I really just want to simplify my package.
She tells me if I lose the second phone line and go from extra large to medium (ah if only), give up the Virgin Plus, it will cost five pounds less than I'm currently paying. Everything I asked for originally. We have a deal. But first she has to transfer me. Again.
If I have to listen to Paolo bleat once more I may wind the telephone wire round my neck and pull, except that it's a cordless.
Another man comes on the line. A bit further North - Yorkshire, mibbe (sic - I'm going for the accent here).
He's incredulous that I want to do without all these lovely extras for a mere saving of 'only' £5 a month.
I don't subscribe to HD despite the telly being ready. Hey, I'm ready for summer but it doesn't mean I'll ever wear a bikini. The V plus does not and has never worked. I repeat. And there's nothing I want to pause or record. Look at my telephone bills. I haven't used the line once in the last two years. I don't watch Kerang, or Bollywood Extra, or the Playboy Channel, or, in fact, anything. The remote hasn't had batteries in it for a week and nobody noticed. I just don't want a whole load of options that I don't need.
Grudgingly he switches me off.
I now have a mere 60 channels of crap (there is only a medium package, no small or extra small) and think longingly of those far off days when your only television worry was getting a damn picture at all by holding the aerial near a window, and Channel Four showed a train running down the tracks because it didn't have enough programs to broadcast full time.
It's now half past seven - more than an hour being passed round call centres. And then the oven pings. This is when it all really starts to go downhill.
Eventually I am connected to a call centre outside Glasgow where my accent twin takes me through all the things I've already done on her script, then resends a new signal, and after ten minutes of waiting for things to reboot, once again I now have 300 channels of rubbish on a television set I rarely switch on.
This sets me thinking. Why am I keeping all these services I don't use and so I ask to be transferred to someone who can help me tailor my package. More lengthy music, and a chap called Dan comes on the line who seems to be somewhere in the Midlands. His voice is a monotone. I explain that I want to cancel my V+ service that never once in the two years I've had it, has worked, my second telephone line which doesn't even have a phone plugged into it, and downgrade my channels to the minimum they offer.
He can do that. However it will cost me £44 per month while I'm currently paying £35. Apparently I get a discount on the package. That's ridiculous, I say. You're telling me that for a severely curtailed service it will cost me more money?
Yes.
Okay then I'll just cancel the whole thing.
I'm bluffing but I know they have to try to keep your business and I want to see if he'll come back with another offer.
You can't. You're not the account holder.
I am the account holder. Check your records. I have full authority to change and amend this account.
No, only the account holder can cancel.
We repeat this dialogue into about the twenty seventh circle of hell before I ask to speak to his supervisor.
I hang on for three songs, one of which is Pink and not a favourite. Not keen on Paolo Nuttini either.
He comes back and tells me that he's just spoken to his supervisor and been informed that the policy has changed and I can now cancel the account if I wish. No apology. No regret.
Are you now the supervisor?
No, I just spoke to her and she... The man is a tape machine.
I interrupt and remind him that I asked to speak to his supervisor and would still like to do so.
Another play of Paolo Nuttini (same one) and on comes a girl. Are you sure you want to cancel? She asks.
I repeat that nobody watches the television and so I really just want to simplify my package.
She tells me if I lose the second phone line and go from extra large to medium (ah if only), give up the Virgin Plus, it will cost five pounds less than I'm currently paying. Everything I asked for originally. We have a deal. But first she has to transfer me. Again.
If I have to listen to Paolo bleat once more I may wind the telephone wire round my neck and pull, except that it's a cordless.
Another man comes on the line. A bit further North - Yorkshire, mibbe (sic - I'm going for the accent here).
He's incredulous that I want to do without all these lovely extras for a mere saving of 'only' £5 a month.
I don't subscribe to HD despite the telly being ready. Hey, I'm ready for summer but it doesn't mean I'll ever wear a bikini. The V plus does not and has never worked. I repeat. And there's nothing I want to pause or record. Look at my telephone bills. I haven't used the line once in the last two years. I don't watch Kerang, or Bollywood Extra, or the Playboy Channel, or, in fact, anything. The remote hasn't had batteries in it for a week and nobody noticed. I just don't want a whole load of options that I don't need.
Grudgingly he switches me off.
I now have a mere 60 channels of crap (there is only a medium package, no small or extra small) and think longingly of those far off days when your only television worry was getting a damn picture at all by holding the aerial near a window, and Channel Four showed a train running down the tracks because it didn't have enough programs to broadcast full time.
It's now half past seven - more than an hour being passed round call centres. And then the oven pings. This is when it all really starts to go downhill.
Borderline
I'm in work with what looks like a blurred tattoo on the inside of my arm, at about the point where people cut their wrists before they get in the bath. Not that this thought has ever occurred to me before, I hasten to add.
Marion, you're too cool for school, says Nessa, who sits opposite me and who, by that last statement has just outed herself as being almost as cool and hip as me. In about 1965.
Where have you been?
The Borderline Club, I mutter, into my chest.
To see what? She is struggling to try and look impressed instead of laughing in my face. As I said she sits opposite me. Laughing is not a good option. I can make her life hell.
Holly Miranda, I mumble.
She fails to register any sign of recognition. I can sing all the tracks thanks to Luke Warm's music addiction and his propensity for turning up armed with bundles of CDs culled from NME, with which to drown out the sound of my voice (which is probably another reason why gigs are so popular, it suddenly occurs to me).
American band, I say. And I wasn't the oldest person there, I add, hastily.
Any good? She asks, quick recovery, despite the twitching lips.
Yeah, really good.
First support band was a teenager in heels she could hardly walk in, looking like one of the clones from Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love video (what? you who weren't even born in 1986, might well ask). She spent half an hour pouting at the audience in a mirror-studied sultry fashion, whilst executing long, pretentious guitar riffs, and then breathing incomprehensibly into the mike, accompanied by another girl in a flamenco dress, energetically playing a squeezebox which seemed like a lot of hard work for a sound that was totally obliterated by the drummer. Second support band featured a gorgeous, pouting blonde Barbie for real girls with amazing smooth, golden thighs like Beyonce and too much hair that she seemed just to have realised she had, and so needed to spend a great deal of time ostentatiously scraping it back and tossing it out of her eyes. Too late in life I realise I have natural heavy metal hair - just when I can't do the head toss for fear of dislocating my shoulder. A curly-topped chap amidst a group of what could have been Christian missionaries, with more than a passing resemblance to 118 (or 118) nodded his head so vigorously in time to her foot stamping in which everything jiggled that I thought it was going to fall off and roll across the floor. Even I fancied her. Whatever your musical taste, it really does make you wish you had stuck at the piano lessons.
The audience, mostly women, many of whom were in plaid, and FF cup bras (or not. Actually some of the men fitted into that category - especially the granddad in the black shirt ensemble) and you could see their breasts coming down the stairs a full two seconds before the rest of them. Luke Warm was transfixed.
I would have said I stood out due to my advanced years and chlorine treated hair, but I'm glad to say I was invisible. It's a mercy really. I often wonder about the popularity of novels and films in which being invisible is the plot device. Be female and over forty and big wow. Unless you stand out because you are wearing a pair of kitten ears and an unwise boob tube and tutu (not to be encouraged) you could probably walk into Tiffany's and leave with three necklaces and nobody would be able to describe you afterwards.
There must be a way of turning this to one's advantage.
Marion, you're too cool for school, says Nessa, who sits opposite me and who, by that last statement has just outed herself as being almost as cool and hip as me. In about 1965.
Where have you been?
The Borderline Club, I mutter, into my chest.
To see what? She is struggling to try and look impressed instead of laughing in my face. As I said she sits opposite me. Laughing is not a good option. I can make her life hell.
Holly Miranda, I mumble.
She fails to register any sign of recognition. I can sing all the tracks thanks to Luke Warm's music addiction and his propensity for turning up armed with bundles of CDs culled from NME, with which to drown out the sound of my voice (which is probably another reason why gigs are so popular, it suddenly occurs to me).
American band, I say. And I wasn't the oldest person there, I add, hastily.
Any good? She asks, quick recovery, despite the twitching lips.
Yeah, really good.
First support band was a teenager in heels she could hardly walk in, looking like one of the clones from Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love video (what? you who weren't even born in 1986, might well ask). She spent half an hour pouting at the audience in a mirror-studied sultry fashion, whilst executing long, pretentious guitar riffs, and then breathing incomprehensibly into the mike, accompanied by another girl in a flamenco dress, energetically playing a squeezebox which seemed like a lot of hard work for a sound that was totally obliterated by the drummer. Second support band featured a gorgeous, pouting blonde Barbie for real girls with amazing smooth, golden thighs like Beyonce and too much hair that she seemed just to have realised she had, and so needed to spend a great deal of time ostentatiously scraping it back and tossing it out of her eyes. Too late in life I realise I have natural heavy metal hair - just when I can't do the head toss for fear of dislocating my shoulder. A curly-topped chap amidst a group of what could have been Christian missionaries, with more than a passing resemblance to 118 (or 118) nodded his head so vigorously in time to her foot stamping in which everything jiggled that I thought it was going to fall off and roll across the floor. Even I fancied her. Whatever your musical taste, it really does make you wish you had stuck at the piano lessons.
The audience, mostly women, many of whom were in plaid, and FF cup bras (or not. Actually some of the men fitted into that category - especially the granddad in the black shirt ensemble) and you could see their breasts coming down the stairs a full two seconds before the rest of them. Luke Warm was transfixed.
I would have said I stood out due to my advanced years and chlorine treated hair, but I'm glad to say I was invisible. It's a mercy really. I often wonder about the popularity of novels and films in which being invisible is the plot device. Be female and over forty and big wow. Unless you stand out because you are wearing a pair of kitten ears and an unwise boob tube and tutu (not to be encouraged) you could probably walk into Tiffany's and leave with three necklaces and nobody would be able to describe you afterwards.
There must be a way of turning this to one's advantage.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Two novels on the Booker Longlist... Great excitement at Pedantic accompanied by popping of corks and surge in Booktrack figures.
The Slap by the lovely (and I mean this, it's not just gushy Pedantic, we-have-to-love-our-authors speak, he's a really nice guy) Christos Tsiolkas and In a Strange Room by the equally charming Damon Galgut .
And I mean that too.
Congratulations to both authors, and long may the Prosecco (it's a recession, so no champagne) flow...
The Slap by the lovely (and I mean this, it's not just gushy Pedantic, we-have-to-love-our-authors speak, he's a really nice guy) Christos Tsiolkas and In a Strange Room by the equally charming Damon Galgut .
And I mean that too.
Congratulations to both authors, and long may the Prosecco (it's a recession, so no champagne) flow...
Monday, 26 July 2010
The Hammer House of Horror
‘It’s beautiful,’ he insists. ‘A really, old fashioned, overgrown wilderness. You’ll love it.’ And so we sit on a bendy bus and go North, something that I don’t usually do without a car and a dinner party as incentive, to a place they call Stoke Newington.
It looks fairly normal, even – and though I’m loathe to say that estate agent word – it’s true, villagey. But not beautiful and not, by any stretch of the imagination, an overgrown wilderness. More of a suburb with too many young people with too much disposable income. But then gloom descents, mist falls someone presses the switch on the dry ice machine and we turn off the high street into a tangled, gothic, Vincent Price, high-Victorian railing-ed, honest to god neither of us believe in, graveyard.
We have arrived at our destination.
As Luke’s daughter told him wryly as he set off to meet me. ‘You really know how to show a girl a good time.’
I pick my way through the concrete path, crazed as old earthenware pottery, with weeds growing through the cracks and nettles and brambles spilling forth from what once would have been, I imagine, a neatly shaved lawn, planted with tombstones, but for now, if I were to use my imagination (which I’m trying hard not to) is just like being in a stadium of the dead, choked with ivy. There are ancient graves everywhere, leaning to the right, to the left, to the front, slumped to the side, collapsed in the undergrowth, covered in vines and creepers, lines and lines of them, like tired spectators, and we’re the show, picking our way silently through the tiny paths that feed off from the wide, main one. We walk in single file and pass a young chap in a three piece suit wearing a trilby. Weird and weirder. It’s in the high eighties and he’s wearing tweed. He gives us a conspiratorial smile. We smile back, not sure why we’re in collusion. Maybe there’s a satanic cult holding a ceremony outside the deserted church with blank , hollowed out windows that lurks in the centre of the cemetery and we're the sacrifice?
I flip flop through fingers of thorns that scratch at my feet. Something stings my elbow.
‘Look at that. It’s amazing,’ says Luke of a huddled angel, tied with thick ropes of ivy to a cross that commemorates Ruth Anne Hope who went to sleep in 1866.
‘Amazing, I agree,’ but I’m a morbid sod, and all these tributes to the dead. to me. say sorrow that the sun fighting through the thick trunks of the trees strung up like a Japanese S&M enthusiast with tiny violet flowers on the vines of deadly nightshade, cannot quite dispel. I see a century of people burying their loved ones, and now all that’s left of them are psoriatic tombs, itchy with overgrowth - each a tragedy.
There’s a picket fence of tiny urns alongside the path that I immediately assume are for tiny people, lost babies who perished in some black bombazine winter put in the icy ground by veiled, consumptive mothers who are doped on laudanum (Sarah Waters has a lot to answer for) but on closer inspection, at which Luke excels (of insects, graves and wrinkles) they are just more modest funerary tributes for those who can’t afford the family mausoleum.
We pass an old guy reading a newspaper on a bench. Further on there are two blokes with a bottle of wine having a picnic. Funny place to have lunch, but hey – I’m on a date, I’m in no position to scoff while they quaff.
A woman with a baby in a stroller crosses the path.
Luke is not pleased. He wants isolation, neglect and atmosphere.
‘Let’s go deeper in,’ he says and goes through a track thinner than my waist, which isn’t that thin, but still involves a sharp intake of breath as I lift my legs like a prancing pony to try and avoid the nettles.
I’m reminded of Scotland when we ran into a very English man of a certain age in socks and sandals who wanted to show us some orchids and who we followed politely through the undergrowth. ‘You know he’s going to kill us and eat us,’ I told him. ‘Well he’ll start with you first.’ Luke replied. The orchid, when we finally found it was tiny, inconspicuous and underwhelming. ‘Creeping, lady’s carpet-slipper,’ or something, the man announced in a hushed voice as though a loud noise might scare it away. ‘Wow, lovely,’ I said kindly while thinking – ten minutes through bog for this? Last time I follow a man into bushes, I thought.
And yet, here I am again. Unaccountably, though, now I’m leading the way past slate and marble and limestone and weeping cherubs and draped urns and crosses and, no – wait a minute, over slate and marble and limestone and draped urns reaching out of the earth like fat forearms as I realise I’m actually walking on gravestones.
Argh. I shudder. And then, phew we reach a clearing.
It should be lovely with dappled sunlight and the spread out branches of a shady oak tree dripping tiny orange butterflies – if you discount dead Archibald and Theodora Cullen who died a week apart and went to God, and their neighbours - but it’s not. It’s full of litter and wet wipes and….
‘Condoms,’ remarks Luke.
‘Lovers,’ I say, incurably romantic, even in the presence of ankle deep sex debris.
‘Prostitutes, probably,’ Luke counters. Not a man who calls a sh*g a sea bird.
I walk quickly and very, very gingerly out in the other direction and dust myself down free of imagined grime when I reach the path. There’s another bench. Another man sitting on it. This time a young black guy in a very tight white t shirt perched on the back rest, feet astride, and as we turn to walk towards where we think the church might be we meet a group of Japanese students, one in costume and made up like a baby doll carrying a camera bag and a light reflector who are obviously going to do a shoot beside the Hammer House of Horror, and yet another slim-hipped man in tight jeans who swaggers towards us without making eye contact.
Penny
Dropping.
CLANG
It seems to occur to both of us at the same time that we are, in fact, sightseeing in a gay cruising area.
I give Luke a very hard push.
‘Something you want to tell me?’ I ask trying not to think about those too-tight for a straight guy black jeans that he wore to Fran’s wedding and which then I admired.
‘I didn’t know,’ he protests as we pass yet another bench with, this time, an older man, and then another who walks off purposefully up the more solitary paths. ‘It wasn’t like this the last time I was here. I must ask Len if he knows anything about it.’ Len, fyi, is his gay best friend. Friend, I repeat reassuringly several times, to myself.
Luke gets his camera out. He wants me to pose in front of an angel with her head in her hands looking bored. I grimace obligingly. The last time he took a photograph of me he deleted it without showing it to me which should give you a clue about how dire it was, especially if I showed the picture he didn’t delete where I’m walking ahead of him. My best points don’t follow the rest of me.
He then walks off holding his very large telephoto lens erect like a divining rod and I perch on Millicent Agnes Oliver, who joined the angels in 1903.
‘Don’t you be long,’ I call after his retreating back.
And then nod to a chap in a wife beater who gives me a tight, fairly smug little smile and sashays past with his mobile phone in his pocket.
At least I’m assuming that’s what it was.
It looks fairly normal, even – and though I’m loathe to say that estate agent word – it’s true, villagey. But not beautiful and not, by any stretch of the imagination, an overgrown wilderness. More of a suburb with too many young people with too much disposable income. But then gloom descents, mist falls someone presses the switch on the dry ice machine and we turn off the high street into a tangled, gothic, Vincent Price, high-Victorian railing-ed, honest to god neither of us believe in, graveyard.
We have arrived at our destination.
As Luke’s daughter told him wryly as he set off to meet me. ‘You really know how to show a girl a good time.’
I pick my way through the concrete path, crazed as old earthenware pottery, with weeds growing through the cracks and nettles and brambles spilling forth from what once would have been, I imagine, a neatly shaved lawn, planted with tombstones, but for now, if I were to use my imagination (which I’m trying hard not to) is just like being in a stadium of the dead, choked with ivy. There are ancient graves everywhere, leaning to the right, to the left, to the front, slumped to the side, collapsed in the undergrowth, covered in vines and creepers, lines and lines of them, like tired spectators, and we’re the show, picking our way silently through the tiny paths that feed off from the wide, main one. We walk in single file and pass a young chap in a three piece suit wearing a trilby. Weird and weirder. It’s in the high eighties and he’s wearing tweed. He gives us a conspiratorial smile. We smile back, not sure why we’re in collusion. Maybe there’s a satanic cult holding a ceremony outside the deserted church with blank , hollowed out windows that lurks in the centre of the cemetery and we're the sacrifice?
I flip flop through fingers of thorns that scratch at my feet. Something stings my elbow.
‘Look at that. It’s amazing,’ says Luke of a huddled angel, tied with thick ropes of ivy to a cross that commemorates Ruth Anne Hope who went to sleep in 1866.
‘Amazing, I agree,’ but I’m a morbid sod, and all these tributes to the dead. to me. say sorrow that the sun fighting through the thick trunks of the trees strung up like a Japanese S&M enthusiast with tiny violet flowers on the vines of deadly nightshade, cannot quite dispel. I see a century of people burying their loved ones, and now all that’s left of them are psoriatic tombs, itchy with overgrowth - each a tragedy.
There’s a picket fence of tiny urns alongside the path that I immediately assume are for tiny people, lost babies who perished in some black bombazine winter put in the icy ground by veiled, consumptive mothers who are doped on laudanum (Sarah Waters has a lot to answer for) but on closer inspection, at which Luke excels (of insects, graves and wrinkles) they are just more modest funerary tributes for those who can’t afford the family mausoleum.
We pass an old guy reading a newspaper on a bench. Further on there are two blokes with a bottle of wine having a picnic. Funny place to have lunch, but hey – I’m on a date, I’m in no position to scoff while they quaff.
A woman with a baby in a stroller crosses the path.
Luke is not pleased. He wants isolation, neglect and atmosphere.
‘Let’s go deeper in,’ he says and goes through a track thinner than my waist, which isn’t that thin, but still involves a sharp intake of breath as I lift my legs like a prancing pony to try and avoid the nettles.
I’m reminded of Scotland when we ran into a very English man of a certain age in socks and sandals who wanted to show us some orchids and who we followed politely through the undergrowth. ‘You know he’s going to kill us and eat us,’ I told him. ‘Well he’ll start with you first.’ Luke replied. The orchid, when we finally found it was tiny, inconspicuous and underwhelming. ‘Creeping, lady’s carpet-slipper,’ or something, the man announced in a hushed voice as though a loud noise might scare it away. ‘Wow, lovely,’ I said kindly while thinking – ten minutes through bog for this? Last time I follow a man into bushes, I thought.
And yet, here I am again. Unaccountably, though, now I’m leading the way past slate and marble and limestone and weeping cherubs and draped urns and crosses and, no – wait a minute, over slate and marble and limestone and draped urns reaching out of the earth like fat forearms as I realise I’m actually walking on gravestones.
Argh. I shudder. And then, phew we reach a clearing.
It should be lovely with dappled sunlight and the spread out branches of a shady oak tree dripping tiny orange butterflies – if you discount dead Archibald and Theodora Cullen who died a week apart and went to God, and their neighbours - but it’s not. It’s full of litter and wet wipes and….
‘Condoms,’ remarks Luke.
‘Lovers,’ I say, incurably romantic, even in the presence of ankle deep sex debris.
‘Prostitutes, probably,’ Luke counters. Not a man who calls a sh*g a sea bird.
I walk quickly and very, very gingerly out in the other direction and dust myself down free of imagined grime when I reach the path. There’s another bench. Another man sitting on it. This time a young black guy in a very tight white t shirt perched on the back rest, feet astride, and as we turn to walk towards where we think the church might be we meet a group of Japanese students, one in costume and made up like a baby doll carrying a camera bag and a light reflector who are obviously going to do a shoot beside the Hammer House of Horror, and yet another slim-hipped man in tight jeans who swaggers towards us without making eye contact.
Penny
Dropping.
CLANG
It seems to occur to both of us at the same time that we are, in fact, sightseeing in a gay cruising area.
I give Luke a very hard push.
‘Something you want to tell me?’ I ask trying not to think about those too-tight for a straight guy black jeans that he wore to Fran’s wedding and which then I admired.
‘I didn’t know,’ he protests as we pass yet another bench with, this time, an older man, and then another who walks off purposefully up the more solitary paths. ‘It wasn’t like this the last time I was here. I must ask Len if he knows anything about it.’ Len, fyi, is his gay best friend. Friend, I repeat reassuringly several times, to myself.
Luke gets his camera out. He wants me to pose in front of an angel with her head in her hands looking bored. I grimace obligingly. The last time he took a photograph of me he deleted it without showing it to me which should give you a clue about how dire it was, especially if I showed the picture he didn’t delete where I’m walking ahead of him. My best points don’t follow the rest of me.
He then walks off holding his very large telephoto lens erect like a divining rod and I perch on Millicent Agnes Oliver, who joined the angels in 1903.
‘Don’t you be long,’ I call after his retreating back.
And then nod to a chap in a wife beater who gives me a tight, fairly smug little smile and sashays past with his mobile phone in his pocket.
At least I’m assuming that’s what it was.
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