Anyone care to join me in a bush tucker trial?

A few weeks ago we had some friends, neighbours and family here for an 'internal' pig roast. By that I mean that we had a huge shoulder of pork cooked in my range cooker and on a low low heat overnight. It was a prime piece of free range pork, prepared by our local butcher who assures me that the little darling had a life of foraging and snorting and rolling around in dust and hay before heading off to the great pigsty heaven in the sky. I try not to dwell on meat and how we get it to the table for I would easily return to my old vegan ways of twenty four years ago so I banish it from my mind and hope that by purchasing free range products that at least my dinner has had the best life possible before ending up on my plate.

Pork shoulder on the bone isn't a cut of meat that we usually eat but the Jamie Oliver recipe looked incredible, (you can find it in his book, 'Simple cooking techniques for thick chav twats with a reading age of five' - or was it his other book - 'How to cook for twenty dole cheats with a budget of £2.50 a head because it's cheaper than a kebab with a bottle of cider thrown in?'. Anyway, as it was our turn to host a do for the usual suspects I wanted something that was easy, that practically cooked itself and would feed an army or two if need be. Himself and my two very tall and adorable step-sons would happily each eat a serving the size of a dustbin lid and still have room for seconds followed by pudding so it's good to know that there was more than enough to go around - I've never truly recovered from a dinner party I did in my early twenties where I was horrified that I ran out of main course because I was hopelessly useless at cooking for grown-ups at the time - up to that point my usual repertoire of meals were anything cheap and cheerful that was quick and easy on a student budget.

Given that the pork had to be cooked for 13 hours, I set my alarm for 3am so that I could whack it in the oven ready for our guests arriving around 4pm the next day. I'd prepared the joint the night before by rubbing on rock salt, oil and fennel seeds all over the scored fat, (oh and all soaking in a bottle of good dry white wine or if you are particularly chavvy and strapped for cash, because you spent all your bunts on fags, then a bottle of buckfast may be substituted), and left it covered and nestling on a bed of fennel bulbs, carrots, onions and pumpkin and good to go at the ungodly hour I had chosen to cook it from, (our friends have kids so having a late lunch/early evening dinner means they can be in bed at a reasonable hour). So, there I was at 3am when the alarm dragged me from my slumber and looking like an effing old coffin dodger zombie on the loose from a Hammer House of Horror movie, I sloped off to the kitchen and cranked up the range to full-on-turbo-nutter high heat for 30 minutes then whacked in the joint - just in case you are interested it has to be fired first off to crisp up the crackling - and then after 30 minutes you drop the heat to 120 and crawl off back to bed leaving the science to do its work.

Some 13 hours later, our guests were tucking into the most succulent moist pork with the best crackling ever - I've never ever cooked crackling before so this was a bit of a triumph by all accounts from those in the know, all served with an amazing gravy, mini baked potatoes, dressed salad, mashed roasted veg, pan fried savoy cabbage and a big big knackered smile from me. I was amazed by it and it was so easy to do, that I have persuaded himself that it should become his signature dish in the future - remember this is the man that fecks on the oven at record high temperatures, sticks his pie in to burn the house down of a Friday night whilst he surfs the net until I smell burning, rush to open the oven door to rescue his burnt offerings and walk away with a face like someone on a night out from a serious burns unit. So, cranking up the oven for that first hour should go some way towards satiating his need to cremate, cremate, cremate - I think he might have been an undertaker in a previous life - and there's method in my madness at 'gifting' him this signature dish - next time he can get his arse out of bed at 3am whilst I gently slumber on. It's definitely going to be a dinner party and festive season offering at our place as not only is it easy, but highly impressive with a wow factor that has all and sundry praising it for days afterwards.

Anyway, I got to thinking about cooking and my absolute passion for it and where I'd inherited it from. Growing up with 8 other siblings in a noisy boisterous household, mealtimes were structured and orderly and almost military like in their timing. Not a sound was heard at the table as we tucked into mince and tatties, mince and dough balls, ham and pea soup, steak and sausage pie and in the summer lighter foods that met with our differing needs for that season. My mother grew her own seasonal vegetables and was a fabulous cook and to return home to the smells of home cooking was a welcome like no other. She inherited her cooking skills from her mother whose home always had a pot of delicious celery soup wafting throughout it as she opened the door to welcome visitors in. Clearly I inherited my passion for cooking from these two ladies who were creative and provided nourishing and rib sticking food throughout two world wars. Both believed that a fire in the hearth and food on the stove was the way you brought your family together and kept them coming home for sustenance and succour when life delivered a hard knock or two.

Now that winter is firmly upon us and with the festive season beckoning, I am heavily into the preparation of Scottish casseroles, Scottish Steak and Sausage pies, Mince and carrot pies, spaghetti meatball Bolognese, rump steak in red wine and dry sherry sauce, chicken and ham pie, Chinese ring-stinger chicken, (so called because it is so loaded with chilli that it would rate a fairly high position on the Scoville scale which is more than evident the next morning as the chilli does its worst as you rush at speed to the loo for an agonising wall clawing poop. You're a better man than me, (and no I still don't have a penis, it is merely a turn of phrase), if you can come out of that loo without a swollen ring stinging away as it throbs big style whilst your sphincter swells to the size of a baby's arm. There's many a guest who has dared me to do my worst with the chilli and regreted having an arse like a baboon the following day. And you know what? Never ever after the age of fifty, trust a fart, especially after eating my ring stinger chicken. You will be deeply ashamed that you have aced your pants when all you hoped to achieve was a silent but violent parp of the ole botty upon your hosts whilst you endeavoured to pretend it was the dogs. Hah! Eat it at your peril for it is not for the faint hearted nor those without an asbestos coated bum or a spare pair of underpants. And so, having painted such a picturesque view of my dish and the after effects, all of this fare is carefully placed into our freezers and is ready to hand for step-sons and visitors who relish a good hearty home cooked meal and himself has a veritable store cupboard of goodies to destroy in the oven if he so wishes.

In talking about himself's culinary shortcomings I am reminded of another so very dear to me and who passed on two years after my mother; her sister, my aunt T, and all round spiffing person altogether. A woman who was deeply affected by being a war baby and who's mission in life was to hoard tinned goods way past any kind of safe 'best before' date lest she ever suffer the indignity and horrors of those hungry war like times ever again. Where my mother was a terrific home cook, aunt T would cook the shite out of anything she happened upon in the kitchen - so much so you often wondered whether it had started out as food in the first place - or whether she'd picked up a shoe and just got on with it thinking it was a cheaper cut of beef. Where myself and my siblings ate hearty home cooked meals my cousins were served a hotchpotch of tinned third-world produced corned beef, burnt to black tatties, (potatoes), a dubious bit of lorne sausage from the bowels of the fridge and tinned nuclear marrowfat peas so luminously green than you could spot the buggers from outer space. No two meals were ever the same and whilst my cousins might have been perilously close to vitamin deficiencies from time to time, she always kept a larder full of fresh fruit and they were never short in being served up the most bizarre concoctions of food that anyone else not suffering from delusional tendencies would ever think to serve up on the same plate.

As testimony to my aunt's disastrous cooking skills, my cousin relates a tale where, as young boys he and his brother were invited to tea at a school friend's house. Upon sitting down to a full plate of food at the table, they were mesmerized by five or so white objects nestling on their plate next to some mince and veg.

"Hey Mrs A, whit's that oan mah plate?", he asked as he pointed his knife towards the unknown objects.

"Eh, dae ye mean the boiled tatties son?", she asks incredulously as she inspects what he's pointing to with his knife.

"That cannae be tatties Mrs A", says my cousin as he picks up the plate to sniff them and to make sure she's not fobbing him off with something that might just taste hideously like brussel sprouts. Given their mammy's lack of culinary skills, he and the younger cousin developed a routine of sniffing food first in the hope they could work out what it might once have been just so they could get an idea of what they were eating.

"Aye sure enough son, that's tatties, now get on and eat it will ye 'afore it gets cold, there a good lad", she says thinking no more about it and perhaps wondering if he was just a bit slow on the uptake or something.

"Nah, that's no tatties Mrs A, never in a million years", pipes up my second younger cousin who has also been inspecting these white beauties on his plate.

"Have you two no ever had tatties afore then?", asks Mrs A, beginning to believe that the rumours about their mammy's cooking abilities must be true.

"Aye of course we have silly", they say in unison, both a little embarrassed at their culinary ignorance of such a basic foodstuff. "But are tatties usually no meant to be black and skite aff yer plate when ye stick a fork in them?, asks the older one in all gloriously naive honesty.

"Nah son, they're meant to be just as they are here", she replied, rolling her eyes for the truth was worse than she'd expected. My cousins tore into the meal with gusto and as they accepted this new properly cooked food group into their diet both agreed that they'd never seen the likes of it in a long time, nor were likely to again anytime soon.

Some years later, the elder of my two cousins was staggering home up the driveway to his house after a wee session down the local when his rather irritating and nosey neighbour popped her head over the fence to tell him with pride that she'd given his mother her old pressure cooker because she had just purchased a new one. Sporting a huge smile she waited for his grateful thanks at such a generous act. Stopping in his tracks and making an effort to focus at least one of his drunken bleary eyes on the woman he would most like to see six feet under, he uttered the following:

"Oh ye did did ye? Ye gave mah mother an effing pressure cooker?", he asked incredulous that someone of supposed sound mind and body would do such a thing. "Whit in the name of God was the world comin' tae?", he pondered, as the horror of her news sunk in.

"Aye, aye ah did, whit's yer problem wae that then?", she asked as the smile slid from her face at the hostile response.

"Oh, no much of a problem at all hen", he slurred sarcastically back at her, "That's just fucking great and dandy", he continued, as he shook his head in disbelief. "Now she can burn the shite oot of ma tatties in half the bloody time it used to take her", he threw at her, as he lurched off indoors to see what culinary delights his mother had left for him to chuck in the bin just before he phoned for a Chinese takeaway.

The pressure cooker just made things worse really, for aunt T loved pottering around in her garden and losing herself in weeding and digging and planting and nurturing it to within an inch of its life - her grass was so perfectly neat that it looked like she cut it daily with nail clippers. When she'd finally remember that she'd started dinner some one hour or so before, she'd sprint like a gold medallist into the kitchen on a rescue mission and could be heard to shout, "I just caught them in time", as black acrid smoke billowed from the pressure cooker and the tatties that were welded to the inside of it. "Just caught them in time for what?", you'd ask yourself open jawed. "Just in time to feck them into the bin or did she have some other unexplained role for them that we were not privy to for she sure as hell hadn't caught them in time to be eaten", we'd tell ourselves. Some years later she discovered the micro wave oven. If you thought that someone's already hideously poor culinary skills couldn't sink to a new low then you have never had sausages, bacon, tattie scones, a fish finger, a beef burger, nuclear peas and a raw egg all cooked together and served up with dry toast for breakfast - butter was unhealthy apparently. If you had thrown the food at a wall, so rubbery was its consistency, that it would still be bouncing around the room today.

Oh but for all aunt T couldn't cook she achieved other great things much more important in life. She was successful and a role model in her career, as a wife, mother, sister, aunt, friend and mentor. She lived a life of Christian values and did endless charity works- thankfully she wasn't let loose in a soup kitchen - that would have been a cruel twist of fate for the hungry homeless people looking for a square meal. She provided me with a safe haven to run to as a child growing up in and who needed to escape from a troubled environment. When her husband was unexpectedly elected to the position of Lord Provost of Glasgow and Lord Lieutenant to the Queen, she rose to the role admirably,only momentarily being slightly caught unawares of her duty and what was expected of her initially but never putting a foot wrong as she embraced each task and grew with the experience. She knew sign language and taught the hearing to communicate with the hearing impaired. She was actively pursuing a programme as lady Provost to introduce sign language to some schools so that communication barriers could be torn down. She could strip down her troublesome spin dryer, service it, fix it and have it back on its feet working a treat until the next time it needed her expertise. In another life she may just have been a fine aeronautical engineer or designer for she was well able to grasp technical detail and idiosyncrasies with no trouble at all. She enjoyed science, but just not the domestic science branch of it. But no matter she couldn't cook for the welcome into her home was genuine and warm and she maintained the best treat store this side of Nirvana. No matter what age you were, if you were good, she'd let you rummage in her treat store that housed mars bars, waggon wheels, club fruit biscuits, tunnox caramels and a whole host of other goodies to make your young eyes light up with joy. Every serious partner I had accompanied me home to my family over the years and to this day, each one of them reverted to being a five year old boy who couldn't wait to be allowed permission to raid the treat store. It was a right of passage and one where you knew you had been accepted into the family.

I get plenty of time to reminisce about times gone past as I chop, scrape, cut, brown, boil whatever it is that I'm preparing. I miss the chatter of my mother around the table as we would companionably go through our pre festive season tasks whilst we shared the skills, knowledge , love and gossip that formed our relationship. Her passing means that she has handed the mantle onto me and I instinctively start preparation some six weeks before Christmas because I too need to feed the people close to me, need to provide a haven of warmth, love, sustenance and succour. My daughter would have been 24 this year but she was not meant to be. I cannot hand onto her the traditions, skills, excitement and heightened expectation that Christmas Eve, the best day ever, will soon be upon us. But as I work studiously, alone in my preparations, I am thankful that I have a husband, two step sons, family and friends that I love and love me back.

To come home and upon opening the door on a wintry night to just soak up the fantastic aroma of my mother's slow cooked Scottish steak and sausage casserole is to almost have my mother there waiting patiently for her marauding children to return to the nest. It couldn't be more evocative and heart-warming. She and aunt T may not be here in person but there is strong evidence that they both inhabited my world and each left me a legacy unique to them. Both inspirational in their own ways even if one cooked like an angel and the other like she was devising the menu for a bush tucker trial on I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out Of Here!

On Christmas day I'll take a moment to think of all who are missing from my life, raise a glass in memory of them, and raise another or two in thanks to those still in my life. I'm certainly thankful I didn't luck out in the great lottery of life and get my aunt's cooking skills and himself says he's eternally grateful too!

A Blast From the Past.....

I opened my desktop email as I do every morning and on seeing the ‘Receiving Mail’ message kick in on the task bar at the bottom of my screen, I waited for the usual mix of round-robin jokey mails that mostly I can live without because they are about as funny as lacerating your piles on a broken glass; couple those with the odd spam about enlarging my penis, (nope I don't have one in case you are wondering), to the length and girth of a Jedi Knight’s lightsaber, (imagine that girls – massively erect, lit up in the dark and being waved at you from five feet away; you could probably have the orgasm of your life followed by a quick hysterectomy and superb cauterisation to minimize the bleeding, come to think of it you could probably have a fairly successful tonsillectomy into the bargain and not even be in the same room as your well endowed lover); add to that a selection of pointless marketing shite about everything you will never need in this life like a fake Rolex watch with an X Factor winner’s face on it and of course besides some wee thieving arsehole trying to con you out of your Abbey savings account balance there is always the ultimate in emails – the fecking death threat chain emails promising you great suffering from the relatively simple boils on your arse infliction to a total wipe-out of your family, business and life as you know it threat if you don’t forward it to 3.2 million people in the next 5 nanoseconds. Like I give a rats ass about them but it does cheese me off that people perpetuate the fear factor and forward them to people they profess to love and care for – oh yeah? So how come you’ve just sent me an email promising torture of unimaginable proportions if I don’t send it on and then you finish off with a salutation of:

‘Hope all is well with you,
Talk soon,
Love,
The mental case that just sent this’.

So erm, how does that work then eh?
But hey, all that crap aside, you might just get lucky and eventually get a golden nugget of an email from family, good friends and old acquaintances that are a joy to read. Lets face it, for all its misuse, email when used for its intended purpose can be magical. It is quite simply the naughties version of the love letter and has encouraged millions driven apart by circumstances to put pen to paper or at least key to document and articulate things they might not have thought of saying in our time poor society.

Well anyway enough pontificating, bugger me, there I was last week firing up the desktop to welcome this array of communication excellence into my home whilst I sauntered off to brush the old gnashers in readiness of having a smile here and there or at the very least a grimace at some old crap that I had to delete - actually if I could get my hands on the wee sods that think I am stupid enough to send them all my bank and family details ranging back to the early 19th century so they can perform an online mugging of my bank accounts I would gladly pull their teeth out one by one in the style of the dentist in the Marathon Man movie where poor old Dustin Hoffman doesn’t look much like he’s enjoying it. For feck sake, that movie set back dentistry about thirty years, as if it needed it. Personally I like to cling to my dentist’s nuts with a tightened bulldog clip whilst he insists on drilling into some deeply soft tissue and jaw bone with a piece of hardened steel that was last used on a construction site. We usually come to an understanding that if he hurts me then he doesn’t get off too lightly himself. Actually this is a piece of artistic license here because my dentist reads my blog and I want him to see it in black and white that I'll come after him and there is no hiding place in this world if he hurts me bad - ever again. It took him ages to find the blog - he kept looking for Genocaushaloldgag - well Christ he'd ask me what it was called when he had a whole fecking denitistry tool kit lodged in my open and by now three foot wide stretched gob - what the hell did he expect? Perfect enunciation whilst I was choking on my own spit?

Anyway, as usual I digress. Incoming email trickled in one by one and settled into a list of twenty or so. One caught my eye simply because it was so unique. ‘ Calling all LDCers’ was the title. My heart skipped a beat and I re-read the title before double clicking on it. “This is going to be interesting”, I thought and I was right. LDC was Sperry Univac’s London Development Centre from the early seventies through to the mid 80’s before it was then dismantled and moved to Milton Keynes. During that time, over 200 of us worked as computer software programmers, hardware engineers, analysts, designers, operators and a big support staff for one of the most exciting and innovative American I.T. manufacturers of its time. It was a place that housed such immense talent and skills and incredible personalities that it would be hard to replicate it today.

HEALTH WARNING - NON TECHNICAL READERS SHOULD SKIP FORWARD OVER THE NEXT PARAGRAPH HERE PARTICULARLY IF YOU OWN A GUN - DON'T READ ON BECAUSE YOU MAY WANT TO SHOOT YOURSELF SHORTLY AFTERWARDS.

It was unique in its time in that the centre was at the forefront of technology, science and physics in inventing and developing the early I.T. systems that are the great great grandparents of the totally sophisticated desktops and laptops of today. Crikey, when we started programming we used Assembler, ASM, then Meta Assembler MASM, Plus, PL1 and eventually FORTRAN and COBOL, 1st, 2nd and third generation languages but then to talk about this technical stuff really is to bore for Britain and America about programming languages. But those with an interest will fondly recall having a punch room full of girls who translated coding sheets onto 80 and 132 column punch cards which were the programmes of the day. These soon gave way to the terminal – a green Cathode Ray Tube with a keyboard which allowed us to type our code into files and run them as a batch run. We were known as the ‘Green Tuber’ generation of I.T. and those green tubes, thanks to the likes of Bill Gates, evolved into the PC’s that we use today.

GOT THIS FAR WITHOUT TOPPING YOURSELF? AWARD YOURSELF 10 GOLD STARS AND DO THE SENSIBLE THING, DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR AND FECK OFF AND READ SOMETHING ELSE OF CONSEQUENCE THAT WON'T STRIP YOU OF THE WILL TO LIVE.

Sperry Univac being the multinational corporation that it was employed a plethora of cultures, nationalities and people from the very wealthy to the very poor but all had a lust for computers and a talent to match - I couldn't believe my luck being employed alongside these great people. London Development Centre, (LDC), had a reputation for excellence, working hard and playing hard and copious amounts of alcohol were consumed over at Charlie’s Prince of Wales, (POW), pub just a skip away over the road from the office. Just for a change now and again, we’d all head off to the Queens Railway Tavern, (QRT), to snort a few gallons of booze there. We firmly believed in keeping the local economy on an even keel and spread our embarrassingly large earnings between the pubs that let us partake of lengthy lock-ins to the extent you practically just rolled back to work the next day rather than go home first. Such was our reputation, people clamoured to get assignments to this place which was a grand melting pot and only language we needed in common was the programming languages we used and a common bond to create the best products in the world - or so we thought anyway!

Humour played a huge part in keeping us going on the long days we worked. Friendships were forged that last to this day. Relationships were made and broken and made again in the biggest dating agency going at that time. I married my first husband, divorced him, met and lived with my second long term partner then broke up and fell in love with another who was never going to be mine because neither of us was free at the same time - and all of them from the same work environment. This was typical of the environment as we all worked long hours and travelled a lot and we saw more of anyone from work than we ever did of friends and family. It was simply an extended university environment and we had some of the best years of our personal and career lives whilst working there.

I saw the world from that office in London Paddington. Both in terms of the differing cultures working there and on the assignments we were sent on overseas. No matter where you went on assignment there was usually someone based there that you knew and nights on the town were the order of the day. There are a thousand adventures I could write about but I won’t bore you with these right now.

And so, yes this email is a golden nugget, a real gem and one that makes having all the other old tat come in worth it in the long run. This email has generated a thousand memories, smiles, reflections on a time gone by and it’s raked up some deeply buried moments that are a joy to rediscover. The point of the email?.........There is to be a reunion next year. As I read through the list of email names it has been sent to, I felt the most immense joy at the thought of seeing so many of these people again. In particular, one name stands out - the second person that I fell in love with. He’s on the list, flew in from overseas for the last reunion which I couldn’t attend so will more than likely be at the next given the amount of notice we have been given this time round.

Will I attend? You bet I will but I think Himself will probably attend with me! He trusts me and is comfortable with me going along on my own but you know, I'd like him to meet some of the finest people that I have known that influenced me greatly in my most formative years; people that I have so much in common with, a shared history and a chance to renew those friendships that got shelved as our profession and industry took a battering and we moved onto pastures new.

And what of those death threat chain emails that I get sent? I usually email the sender and ask them not to send me these emails but if they ignore my requests, then I just send it back to the person that sent it to me.....Keeps them paranoid wondering what the hell to do with it now and I get a laugh out of it!