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| Plenty of Bloody Slugs |
One of things about my family is that they will not let you leave their house until they have collated some kind of food parcel for you to "take back". Despite me pointing out that we do have grocery shops in the South of England I'll still be handed "a few bits".
This charming trait means over the years I have hauled more tins of chocolate pudding & spuds down the M6 than a Morrisons' lorry. I've stunk my Nobby Nissan out with cheese & pâté left over from a New Year's Eve buffet and permanently keep a cool box in the boot in case someone hands me a "spare" frozen chicken.
Once, when I went round to pick up a spare set of keys for Cuz's flat so I could perform holiday plant-watering duties, I left with a stalk of broccoli and half a pint of semi skimmed. At the time I lived three minutes walk away from a Co-op so I'm not sure what famine she anticipated was going to hit Ealing that fortnight.
My lovely Irish Grandad was the same whenever I went to visit him. But he was a champion gardener so whatever he handed you was not shrink wrapped or freeze dried.
"Take that for your Mammy" he'd say passing you a huge bit of vegetation wrapped very badly in newspaper. He wasn't into carrier bags so whatever he'd just dug up got wrapped in a bit of the "Echo".
This wasn't good for my street cred. There'd I be on the top deck of the number 61* bus with a huge stinking cauliflower on my lap praying no one from school got on.
He was into organic gardening before organic gardening existed and while you were nursing your giant cabbage in your lap all sorts of primeval life forms would start emerging - slugs, spiders, big fat green caterpillars and beetles with teeth & an attitude problem... Alighting at Fazakerley bus terminus you knew you'd left a number of unusual 'passengers' behind on the seat as well as trailing soil down the stairs.
The worst was rhubarb. Because if you were handed rhubarb that meant it was going to rain on the way home and the newspaper would get soggy and then the rhubarb would roll onto the pavement and then you'd have to walk from the bus stop to your house clutching half a dozen of sticks of rhubarb in each hand looking like some eco-nutter-baton-twirling-drum-majorette.
I still hate rhubarb.
* I spent hours on the 61 before I left home. Most of my life was conducted sitting on the fucking 61.
This charming trait means over the years I have hauled more tins of chocolate pudding & spuds down the M6 than a Morrisons' lorry. I've stunk my Nobby Nissan out with cheese & pâté left over from a New Year's Eve buffet and permanently keep a cool box in the boot in case someone hands me a "spare" frozen chicken.
Once, when I went round to pick up a spare set of keys for Cuz's flat so I could perform holiday plant-watering duties, I left with a stalk of broccoli and half a pint of semi skimmed. At the time I lived three minutes walk away from a Co-op so I'm not sure what famine she anticipated was going to hit Ealing that fortnight.
My lovely Irish Grandad was the same whenever I went to visit him. But he was a champion gardener so whatever he handed you was not shrink wrapped or freeze dried.
"Take that for your Mammy" he'd say passing you a huge bit of vegetation wrapped very badly in newspaper. He wasn't into carrier bags so whatever he'd just dug up got wrapped in a bit of the "Echo".
This wasn't good for my street cred. There'd I be on the top deck of the number 61* bus with a huge stinking cauliflower on my lap praying no one from school got on.
He was into organic gardening before organic gardening existed and while you were nursing your giant cabbage in your lap all sorts of primeval life forms would start emerging - slugs, spiders, big fat green caterpillars and beetles with teeth & an attitude problem... Alighting at Fazakerley bus terminus you knew you'd left a number of unusual 'passengers' behind on the seat as well as trailing soil down the stairs.
The worst was rhubarb. Because if you were handed rhubarb that meant it was going to rain on the way home and the newspaper would get soggy and then the rhubarb would roll onto the pavement and then you'd have to walk from the bus stop to your house clutching half a dozen of sticks of rhubarb in each hand looking like some eco-nutter-baton-twirling-drum-majorette.
I still hate rhubarb.
* I spent hours on the 61 before I left home. Most of my life was conducted sitting on the fucking 61.
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