I started off this post with the title food memories, not meaning memories of food but more the memories that are conjured up by eating food. What I’m really talking about is comfort food and the way food can comfort you by bringing back old and comfortable memories.
I’m going to start with ham sandwiches. To begin with I love bread and I love sandwiches. One of the recent highlights -if I can use that word in this context- of my brother’s recent funeral (maybe highlights is the wrong word after all) was the buffet. I really do love a good buffet. Sandwiches, obviously, pork pies, sausage rolls, salads; yes I love all that. Not long ago I was alone and missing my brother and feeling a little sorry for myself and so I made myself a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and as I was eating it a whole raft of memories seemed to sail by.
I used to come home for my school dinners and the usual sort of thing we would have for lunch were sandwiches. Sometimes cheese, sometimes corned beef but more often than not we’d have ham sandwiches. Nothing fancy, just plain old boiled ham on white bread. Later, when we had moved house and I no longer came home for dinner, my mother would make me up a lunchbox with sandwiches and sometimes her home made cakes.
Later still when I started work in city centre Manchester what did she push into my hands as I left for work? Yes, my trusty lunchbox filled with ham sandwiches.
When I was no longer living at home, I would occasionally spend my dinner breaks having a pub lunch or eating in our work’s canteen although usually I’d bring my own sandwiches. Even at my very last job, just prior to retiring, if you came across me in our rest area I’d be sat with a cup of tea and a sandwich, more often than not ham on white bread.
Probably the very first thing I could make for myself was tomato soup. Well, I didn’t actually make it. No, I opened the can, emptied it into a pan and warmed it up. To this day I love tomato soup. I sometimes even have it in restaurants. I just think soup is the perfect starter to a meal and I must confess, I’m more of a starter and main person than a main and dessert man.
Just thinking about tomato soup brings back memories of sitting in my mum’s kitchen slurping my soup and telling Bob, our dog, that no meat was involved and he was wasting his time tapping my leg with his paw as no tit bits would be forthcoming.
A slightly unrelated picture: Cheese in a French restaurant with a pichet of vin rouge
Mum had a very sunny kitchen and I can vaguely remember sitting there on the day I first started work, eating my porridge and drinking my tea and feeling slightly apprehensive. My dad set off for work on his bike and mum gave him his sandwiches and brew can before he left. Perhaps he wished me good luck as he left, perhaps he just gave a sort of nod to me and mum and then went on his way. Anyway, just as I was leaving, mum gave me my lunch of ham sandwiches and then I walked down to the bus stop and joined the other commuters on their way to work.
The dish that I first learned to actually make was boiled eggs. I like my eggs not too runny and not too hard preferably served with two slices of toast. I don’t have then very often these days but Liz does make really good boiled eggs. When I make them, they either come out hard or with the white not done enough although there was a time when I was much younger when I could do them perfectly. Two eggs and two rounds of lightly done toast make a lovely breakfast.
Boiled eggs and toast: Yummy
Another comfort food for me is a cheese and ham toastie. Cheese and ham are two of my favourite ingredients so why not add them together for a really comforting snack. Two slices of white bread, buttered on the outside. Add a slice of ham, some grated cheddar cheese and chopped onion and slap them either on a toastie maker or dry fry them in a pan. I tend to cook them on my George Foreman grill and they are so nice for a late evening snack with a glass of red wine of course.
Years ago, when I started work on the buses my friends told me that would be the end of my social life because of shifts and early starts and late finishes. As it happened nothing could have been further from the truth. Because we worked such odd hours it seemed to me that me and my colleagues were even more determined to socialise. After early shifts we were down at the busman’s club playing snooker, pool or cards. It was the same after a late shift. Our club was open till 12 so we would be able to get in for a last pint and a quick game of cards or pool. Personally, I have never been interested in cards but back in those afternoons after the end of an early shift I learned to play snooker. I was a pretty keen player for a while; I even had my own cue.
Sometimes we even went down to a local night club, Genevieve’s, where the bouncers used to let us in as long as we took off our bus badges.
After a split shift finishing round about 7 I used to either visit a pub not far from the depot or up to the club and something that they both served was a cheese and ham toastie. Eating one today reminds me of early evenings either in a Stockport pub called the Unity, now sadly closed, or our busman’s club. The only food the club served apart from crisps and nuts was a toastie. I’d usually have one while waiting for either the pool or the snooker table with a pint of Boddingtons listening to the banter of my fellow busmen.
Here’s one final food memory. As we’ve had a certain amount of hot weather lately, Liz and I have been having an increased number of barbecues. We are cooking the usual stuff of course; burgers, kebabs and steaks. We also have some vegetarian elements like padron peppers and mini sweetcorns. We also have been having home grown new potatoes. They are not actually cooked on the barbecue although we do tend to warm them up on the heat when they have cooled down. New potatoes are wonderful with just a knob of butter. At our last barby I ate them with coleslaw which brought back another bus related food memory.
In the last few years of GM Buses, when the government forced the splitting of the company into two separate parts, GM Buses North and GM Buses South, I was working in Metro Comms, our communications room. I was allocated to GM Buses North and I wasn’t very happy as our comms room was in the heart of GM south territory. Originally Atherton depot was earmarked for the North comms room and I bought a house in Newton-le-Willows, a short drive away. Then the company decided to switch comms to Oldham giving me an hour drive to work. Not only that, sometimes in the winter I would leave Newton in the rain and arrive at work in Oldham to find two foot of snow.
Still, we had a nice set up in Oldham, a nice comms room to ourselves which our bosses and supervisors rarely visited and a nice kitchen which we shared with a couple of computer guys and the HR staff. Naturally I usually had sandwiches for lunch but sometimes in the summer I’d walk up to the shopping centre and get myself a baked potato and coleslaw from a street food vendor who had a small stall with a portable oven. One day I made my way up there, ordered my spud and realised I had forgotten my wallet (a trick perfected by my colleagues in the Noble Order of Tightwads) and he said ‘never mind, give me the money tomorrow’ which was really nice of him.
There we go then, that’s my short list of comfort foods, all of which bring back good memories.
What are your comfort foods?
Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.
This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.
In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.
This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.
Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.
This was the second Bond book to be published and the action takes place in the USA and the Caribbean, which Fleming loved and bought a house there which he named Goldeneye. Live and Let Die and in fact the whole book series were recently reissued with all the politically incorrect stuff removed which makes me wonder whether there was in fact anything left to publish after that process was complete. The book was published in 1953 and comes complete with all the prejudices and sexual and racial intolerances of the era. In one segment when Bond visits Harlem, Fleming tries to reproduces the accents and slang terms of the black people of Harlem and for me it’s not one of Fleming’s best books. In the film version, Roger Moore took over the licence to kill and the result was a very tongue in cheek version of James Bond. Sorry but Roger Moore as Bond just wasn’t for me. The film did feature a great theme song from Paul McCartney which was really a little underused in the film. Another feature of the film was a power boat chase along the Bayous of Florida which was a lot of fun but not entirely serious.
This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.
Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.
British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.
Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.
A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.
I mentioned a while ago about my 
I published a post quite a while ago about the month of January. January of course is cold and believe me, I hate the cold so I thought I’d get a lot of cold and chilly feelings off my chest by writing about my least favourite time of the year. Today I’m going to go the opposite way and write about the month of July, generally the warmest month of the year. In fact the warmest month ever recorded was 
My brother Colin died almost two months ago and even now I find it hard to believe. Going home a couple of weeks ago I picked up two pizza bases from the shops. I bought two without thinking because I’d usually make Colin and me a couple of small pizzas for when he came round for one of our regular bi-weekly chats.
Forsyth did his national service in the RAF and was commissioned as an Acting Pilot Officer in 1956. After leaving the RAF he became a journalist working for the news agency Reuters and later he joined the BBC. He was the perfect choice for a foreign correspondent as he spoke numerous languages including French, German and Russian. In 1967 he was reporting on the war between Biafra and Nigeria when the BBC decided they were no longer interested in that particular war. Forsyth resigned from the BBC and continued to report on the war as a freelance. He even admitted later that this was when he was recruited by MI6 as an informant.
The Day of the Jackal
The Fourth Protocol
I see that I started this blog page back in 2014 and my first post went out on the 23rd of May. It wasn’t anything exciting, in fact it was pretty much a sort of advertisement for my book 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 