Sogger’s Blog

Note from author: “If you are family member and come across this post, please remember that it is a nostalgic piece, not written to offend - we are a product of our times and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Why am I pre-emptively placating a family member who may, or more likely, may not, read a description of our eating habits from 30 years ago? Mainly, I guess, because every time I have touched on the subject of eating habits, it seems to provoke a hostile, defensive reaction. Why? I suspect it’s because we know that the working-class stereotype of the family with dinner on the knees, watching television has some basis in fact and we feel a tad guilty about it. The Royle Family didn’t help matters either.

So, come with me on a journey through space and time: I am going to describe mealtimes in my family (as usual, in stereotypical terms), but it applies equally to most people I knew at the time. Remember the context: it’s the late 70s and early 80s in a northern, working class family. Let’s get the vocabulary right as well. Three meals a day: breakfast, dinner and tea (and porridge or Ovaltine for supper if you behaved yourself). None of this breakfast, lunch and dinner nonsense. There’s no such thing as a starter and a dessert is called a pudding. And brunch - what the hell is that!

It’s 1979, Monday, 5:35PM and the TV is on (“that’s what it’s for”), Blue Peter and John Craven’s Newsround have just finished and Rhubarb and Custard will be starting soon. Dad’s just got home from work; upstairs for a wash and back down he comes, flops into his chair and dinner is served immediately. All the family gathers round, plates on knees and cup of tea on the floor, between the feet. It’s by no means comfortable - the food is difficult to control as you push it around the plate with upper legs clamped together, lower legs akimbo, feet pointing inwards, heels off the ground and elbows clasped tightly to your sides. The result of this is that the stomach is naturally constricted - maybe that’s why we didn’t get overweight - you can’t get as much food in when you are eating bent over double…the ensemble looks like a group of cowering, plate-holding, mesmerised TV-worshippers. 6 o’clock, the pots are already washed and it’s all over for another day.

If you can’t picture it, perform the following experiment: take your laptop off the desk, move to the sofa, sit down on the edge of the sofa, put the laptop on your knees, take a look at your posture and re-read the previous paragraph and you will get it - what goes around comes around. I’m sure there’s some kind of irony in there.

It’s the same routine, Monday to Thursday, but Friday nights were best - my special treat is to be sent down to the chippie at 5:30PM to join the queue that snakes round the shop, out of the door and around the corner, “Fish and Chips, 4 times please, with a bag of scraps” (scraps are the bits of batter that are left over from the fish - they come for free for some reason). Heaven! But we weren’t one of those common families - we use plates, no eating directly from the newspaper for us. But who’d have thought that fish and chip shops would lead the way with paper recycling?

Years later, the town went all upmarket when the “Potato Parlour” opened- a baked potato shop. It didn’t last long - bad timing and market research I think - they opened at around the time when microwave ovens arrived; everybody felt they had to have one, but nobody knew what to do with them apart from making baked potatoes and reheating cups of tea that you had left lying on the floor while you ate your tea (at least, the cups of tea that you hadn’t kicked over as you stood up to take your plate back to the kitchen).

So mealtimes were purely functional with only one exception - Christmas Day. You could tell this was a special occasion: it was the only meal of the year that we ate at the table, and, instead of tea, we had a glass of Marsh’s Sass to drink with our meal. But sitting at the table just didn’t feel right. OK, you were comfortable and didn’t get cramp after 5 minutes, but it was unnatural to be looking at somebody rather than at the TV, so heads would crane round to watch the Wizard of Oz while waiting to get through the Christmas pudding and back in front of the TV in time for the Queen’s speech. Phew, Boxing Day, and normality is restored.

Well, there’s a little trip back in time to peek through our living room window. You want to go and have a little peek through the window today? Well, the plates are on the table now, you’ll have to look a little bit later in the evening or you won’t see anything, the kids are no longer there, dad isn’t tired out from painting walls all day and is more likely to be seen with a glass of wine in his hand rather than super-heated tea. The chippie has closed down, but the TV is still there, albeit with a flatter screen and is more likely to be showing Jamie Oliver cooking Rhubarb and Custard.

As a family, eating dinner in front of the TV is wrong in many ways, but hey, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. My wife is out tonight - she’s French and doesn’t understand. I can’t let life in France erode my children’s cultural heritage: “Put the TV on kids, sit down and I’ll bring you a plate of frites…”.

I’ve been in denial for 20 years - Adrian Wright saved my life and I never acknowledged it! Who is he and how did he save me?

It goes back to my first job after graduation. A northern lad, full of energy, I moved to the south where I found southern lads with more energy and work colleagues with no energy, waiting for retirement. Adrian fitted somewhere in between: he was neither overtly northern or southern and had lots of energy, very little of which was dedicated to his professional life. By day, he shared an office with a pot-smoking intellectual and a girl I thought was a lesbian until the day I left the company (she wasn’t). By night and weekend he was a keen windsurfer and he was kind enough to take me and others along with him and to give us lessons.

I had never been windsurfing before, but of course, was already an expert before I tried - “It’s just a question of balance”. Unfortunately, this is not quite true. Balance comes into it, but an understanding of wind dynamics and some technique plays a large part. I paid no heed to this - why would I need to? A few tries and I was able to go in a straight line. Learning to turn (or “tack” as us nautical types like to call it), could come later - speed is the buzz, tacking is boring.

So one evening after work, off I set. The tide is on its way out (or “ebbing” as us nautical types like to call it). Wow, I seem to be going faster than ever. Either my technique is improving or the tide is ebbing with a following wind…erm, wait a minute, that seems to be the case. Now I’m going really fast - those people on the shore are waving to me; and shrinking at an alarming rate. Actually, balancing is getting quite difficult too - the water is a bit rough (or “choppy” as us nautical types like to call it). Time to sit down and try to remember what Adrian told me about tacking. Something about not going directly into the wind, but kind of zig-zagging across it. OK, let’s give that a try. Wait a minute, what’s that ripping noise? Ah, that would be the top of the sail coming apart from the mast. I think that means that, essentially, I am floating on a plank towards Belgium…

Adrian had evidently noticed this and borrowed a board from a bystander and was balancing and tacking for all he was worth towards me. I was sat down on the board, having realised my predicament. I didn’t really fancy going to Belgium - I had work tomorrow and, in any case, hypothermia would claim me long before I got to sample any of their chocolates. So along came Adrian, like a knight in fluorescent rubber armour. He pulled alongside and told me to hold onto the back of his board. He then tacked against an ebbing tide and the wind pulling a useless rigid weight (and the windsurfing board that he was sat on) with its ripped sail dragging in the water. This was in the days before high-tech, low-weight equipment. It must have been incredibly difficult for him because we were well out into the estuary.

After a while he made it back to the shore where I was able to play the comedian, give a brief thank you and not realise just how much danger I had been in - until now. I left the company shortly afterwards and have never seen Adrian again.

So, Adrian, if Google ever brings you across this post, I would like to say thank you, and please accept my apologies for not thanking you properly at the time - put it down to long-since evaporated youthful arrogance (as us non-nautical types like to call it).

How many real friends do you have? I am talking about the type of friend who you might not see for 5 years, but, as soon as you meet, you pick up right where you left off. This is the friend, who, if you were to turn up on their doorstep late at night, suitcase in hand, tears streaming down your face, would invite you in, put the kettle on, and not ask questions or look slyly at their partner/watch/TV.

Chances are, you won’t have many. In fact, people can count themselves lucky if they have any friends like this. Friends come and go: “we used to go mountain-biking together”, “he was a good laugh”, “we went to the football together”, that sort of thing.

I reckon I have 3 friends of this “calibre” - I’m a lucky guy. The problem is that because I live in France, seeing them once every few years is a reality. In the spirit of “New Year, New Resolutions”, I decided to call one of them over the holiday period. He’s as phone-shy as me, so it wasn’t our best medium. However, I gathered that he hasn’t had a great year. Some of the details I will omit (even though he will never read this) ,but some of them, viewed from the outside (i.e. by you), are quite amusing and ironic.

My friends wife is great; off-the-wall and extremely funny, although often it is unintentional. She has a sister. Her sister is nothing like her and they have always found it difficult to get on. Her sister is extremely career-oriented and became a highly paid management consultant. It was at work that she met her husband, another highly paid management consultant. Unfortunately for both of them, getting to the top invariably entails sacrifices. In their case it was the ability to relate to other human beings on a personal level.

However, once they had a child, her husband changed and realised that maybe there is more to life than downsizing other people’s businesses (or whatever it is that management consultants do). Given that they were rolling in money, at the age of 35, he decided to retire to look after their child. From then on, weekdays were spent playing golf, punctuated by, no doubt, inconvenient school runs. However, it seems that after a couple of years of this, the school runs became more and more interesting to him: so much so that last year he left his wife for one of the mothers that he met every day at the school gates. He’s now gone back to work as a highly-paid management consultant and his new partner has taken over childcare duties during the week. Ironic don’t you think? I do.

Anyway, my friend’s wife’s sister (still with me?), as I said, sacrificed the ability to express herself. This has left her incapable of coping and she has, over the course of the year phoned my friend’s wife for at least 3 hours a day. This is OK - everyone needs a shoulder to cry on. However, 3 hours a day for a year can get tiring for the person who has to listen, especially when is is a single-subject monologue. My wife has now started phoning her on a regular basis in order to let my friend’s wife let off steam, something she appreciates - the chance to talk to another female about her problems and not somebody else’s. Ironic also, don’t you think? I do.

A second, and completely unrelated event happened during the year as well. After 45 years of marriage, my friend’s mother met up with an old boyfriend, left my friend’s father and went to live in Canada. Devastating I would imagine. He seemed quite phlegmatic about it, so I ventured the question, “Did they meet on Friend’s Reunited?”. “Senile Old-Age Pensioners Reunited, more like.” he replied.

All-in-all, it was what the Queen would call and “Annus Horribilus” (which doesn’t translate from the Latin as “an ugly backside”. At least, I don’t think so).

To finish, writing this, I struggled with the question, “If these are such great friends, how come you could never envisage telling them that you have a blog?”. Maybe, like my friend’s wife’s sister, I am unable to connect to people on a personal level and can only express myself anonymously? If this is the case, like my friend’s wife’s sister, it would have been nice if it went hand-in-hand with a successful career. Ironic don’t you think? I do.

I thought this blog would be a view of French life through the eyes of an Englishman. However, more and more of the stuff I want to write about is England viewed through the eyes of an estranged Englishman. I have to admit before continuing that my view is becoming narrower and narrower and is mostly formed through friend and family visits and TV, so I am likely to be more and more out of touch -please forgive me in advance.

That said, I saw an excellent piece on Sky News the other day (there’s a phrase you won’t often read: a perfect example of an oxymoron). There was a set of meteorological conditions that meant that high winds came down the east coast of the UK and into northern France and excessively high tides were expected. The news reports said that whole towns had been evacuated and the main roads blocked off by police the night before the storm in order to avoid a repeat of a similar incident in the 50’s that caused hundreds of deaths. This is all very well, but to an ignorant Englishman abroad, seemed to be an over-reaction given that nothing had been mentioned on any news programs I had seen in France.

In the end, the “perfect storm” never really materialised. However, there was one part of the Sky report that made me realise how there is a heart of Englishness that seems to be unique and that I miss; one that would never be seen in France and is probably dying out in England with the older generations. One small town had been mostly evacuated into a school gym for the night and they interviewed an elderly guy: “How are they treating you?” the journalist asked. His reply was priceless: “Ooh, just great - we want for nothing - they give us all the tea we need.”

There have been whole books written on Englishness, but my brief analysis of his reply is that it was a stoicism that came from years of hardship suffered by his generation, when events such as the wartime air-raids meant that people often spent evenings in shelters with only a “nice cup of tea” to keep them warm (note that there is no such thing as a “cup of tea”, it must always be prefixed with “nice”). Of course, I must add my “but I might be wrong” cover-your-ass caveat here.

The French suffered in the war too, but I reckon that subjected to an evacuation like this, both French people and post-war English generations would not accept it with such good grace.
I should also add that I don’t even know if his was a typical reaction, but what a great old boy - I hope he got a good night’s sleep and has many more.

This little anecdote from my father made me laugh and I wanted to record it for posterity for my own amusement. It came from his 80-year-old neighbour (who, for the record, hasn’t lost his marbles).

I suspect you have to know a bit about the character to find it amusing, but if I ever write a novel, this little monologue will slip in. It’s language and style from another era (but firmly rooted in northern England). As an exercise in style, I tried to write it phonetically to capture the accent. Not sure it works, but here goes:

“Y’alright Dave?”
“If thez one thing ah carn’t bloody stand, it’s cheats”
“Ar’ve bin watching that program, “The Weakest Link” an’ y’know what? The strongest link always gets t’end and then t’others vote ‘em off and thee never win!”
“People t’day ave no scruples!”

“An another thing ah can’t bloody stand is liars”
“Ah bought these trousers las’ week and thee said thee were non-crease”
“Bloody creases everywhere, the lying buggers. Med in Britain too!”
“Y’know whats t’worst in all that Dave? Ah can’t bloody stand ironing”.

And off he went.

I hope it doesn’t come over as mockery, because I know and love the guy (I have known him all my life) and he’s never short of an off-the-wall comment. I hope he has many years left if only so I can get some more for the novel…