The Bitch reminisces

To call my mother a bad cook would be an understatement. She was a truly appalling cook. It wasn’t until I got to go to school (and in England in those far off days the schools provided hot lunches) that I discovered that gravy was supposed to move. At some stage in my formative years she shoplifted the precursor to a food processor, which was a simple one-speed blender. She never got past the first page of the “recipe” booklet, which was a cheese and tomato sandwich. It was a simple recipe (which of course suited her talents), throw tomatoes and cheese in blender, turn on, smear over bread and serve. I don’t recall if it was the acidity of the tomatoes or the fact that this mess looked like vomit but it always tasted like vomit. As I type this blog I am retching with an involuntary gag reflex. Eating my mother’s food was like getting your stomach pumped in reverse. To be fair she did, in later life, extend her repertoire to chip sandwiches (for the benefit of you colonials chips in English means fries, we call chips crisps) until one night she left the chip pan on and pretty much torched the house. After that we were back on sick sandwiches.

So having set the scene let us go back in time to the mid sixties. Two days before Christmas the old man brought home a fresh turkey. I assume that it had fallen off the back of a truck and that the fall had killed it but it still had two legs and wings and feathers. The next day I observed the parental units pouring over Mrs. Beaton’s Good Cook Book punctuated by the occasional heated words. This was going to be bizarre even by our family standards.

Christmas morning I was up at six when I should have won an award for the shortest lived Christmas present. I got a model helicopter that sat on a handle. You pulled the string on the handle, which span the blades and the helicopter soared into the air. As soon as I unwrapped it I put it on the base and pulled the string. It really did soar, right into the living room ceiling where it smashed into a hundred pieces of cheap plastic.

Fast-forward 8 hours. Have you ever seen something that is so unbelievably unexpected that you literally cannot believe your eyes? Well try to imagine this. At lunchtime I wandered into the kitchen and there was Christmas lunch laid out on the table. A brown turkey steaming away, creamed potatoes, roast potatoes, sprouts, swede, parsnips and a big jug of gravy. This was incredible, unbelievable, I recall actually rubbing my eyes in disbelief. We sat down and the old boy brought out a bottle of champagne, God alone knows where that had come from. He removed the safety cage and pausing only to congratulate the cook, pried the cork out with his thumbs. The cork flew out, smashed the fluorescent tube in the ceiling and showered the table with shards of broken glass. There then followed a brief period of mourning for what might have been before the old girl flounced out of the kitchen followed a moment later by the slamming of a bedroom door. I looked up at the old man and his look of resignation was my cue to disappear. My Christmas lunch was spent gluing a helicopter together whilst gorging on Christmas chocs. I knew that I had to fill up before that damned blender was fired up again.

Happy days.
TCB