Grace Dent (52:11)
Could be anybody. It's just a large yucca plant or something. Yeah. Holidays were not gastronomical adventures when I was small. If we were lucky, we might as get. If we were lucky, we might get as far as a chalet at Pompton's holiday camp in South Pole Airport, where the canteen served lumpy mash and battered fish slice. Fish slice, yeah. Maybe that was just a northern thing. Kind of an indiscriminate part of fish, basically. Fish slice 14 times per week. After which at Pontins there would be a dance with your dad competition. Sometimes we'd go to a small hotel in Rhyl, North Wales. I'd eat a sugar dummy on a rope during a day trip to Llandudno Pier. Or I'd have a Walls Cornetto at Liverpool International Garden Festival and then it'd be back to Kirby to see my Scouse nan and she'd get out the Rovers biscuit assortment. The pinnacle of all of this was Siloth on Solway. Now, Silith on Solway is a seaside port. It's only 20 miles from the front door of Carlisle. My front door in Carlisle. I don't know. I think anyone that's listening to this is probably somewhere near Your house, that was about 15 mil, that whenever the sun shone, you got took there. Silly will always hold a special place in the heart of millions of northerners and folk from the southwest of Scotland. For me, it's very much the Las Vegas of Cumbria. Experiencing a bit of pushback against that, we leave the urban landscape of Kuruk Kalaa with its graffiti and its pebbled out, and very quickly we'd end up somewhere with places that sold buckets and spades and ice pops. And there were penny arcades with one of those push machines where you might even win a 10 pack of regal Blue King size with a fiver Sellotape to it if you fed it enough two pence pieces. Now, whenever I've read that piece in somewhere like Bath, right, they always go, oh, bless her. Like, I'm kind of like a Ken Loach walking Ken Loach movie. And I always. I was thinking, oh, that was the best bit, a 10 pack of cigarettes with a fiver on it, okay. It always felt like holiday time at Siloth because the postcards, the shops had naughty postcards of women, large boobs having their bums felt. And that's without mentioning the chunky little. A chunky little van that would go around the street selling homemade ice cream. Sometimes we'd go to the tea rooms and Mum would buy us a jam tart and a glass of banana Nesquik and we'd eat fish and chips in the paper sat on the bonnet of my mam's British Leyland Princess overlooking the Irish Sea. In the summer, when the sun shone, we'd be down to the beach on the firth, building sandcastles on the dunes close to Sellafield until our shoulders peeled. Then when the holidays finished, we'd return to school, only to be taken back to Siloth on a school trip. Yes, back to the only place we'd ever been, but this time carrying tracing paper to do rubbings of stones and packed lunches with egg sandwiches that stunk the bus out. None of this compares to the excitement of Easter 79, when we spent 14 full days in Siloth. Mam took me and my little brother for an extended sojourn in a static caravan, and I thought it terribly brave of her to take us on her own, although I look back now and understand she was simply sick to the back teeth of my father, sick of his asthma, sick of his moaning, sick of the washing pile. I think she'd found one snotty hanky down the side of the settee too, and weren't too many. It was an ambitious April trip and the forecast said that it would be raining the entire time and terrific winds would be blasting across the Irish Sea, liable to knock over our caravan. Mam, however, was determined we would venture to the shop. We weren't bothered by the rain at all because the thing is about a static caravan is that the more it rains outside the snugger you are inside. And rain just made it even more exciting when Mum would fold down that caravan table and serve us lunch and it would always be something out of a tin and it was almost always pasta on white toast. A lot of the time it would be ravioli, small plumps plus small plump envelopes of salty mole colored sludge or noodle doodles that came in the shape of butterflies or spaghetti hoops. You can't beat spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce. Tastes nothing like the original fruit. That delicious blend of modified corn flour, citric acid, sugar and garlic salt. Tinned pasta is on my grocery delivery every time. It's available in every supermarket. When I'm far from home, it's my savior. When I'm sad and tired and when hotel room service has stopped serving, that's when I buy my small tins of pepper pig spaghetti and I can eat it with a teaspoon. Tinned spaghetti has this particular special place in my life. It's basically adult baby food. Tinned spaghetti is day nine in a static caravan and the rain has poured to such an extent that the parking area is flooded. But we are adventurers. Tinned ravioli is my mum making tea and she's reading us James and the Giant Peach. She's reading us Pam Air's poems to make us laugh. Oh, I wish I'd looked after my teeth, she would say. And it's Kid Jensen on the radio and it's us dancing to Physical by Olivia Newton John. And it's watching Starsky and Hutch on a portable telly. And it's dad arriving, trying to make amends and her saying, get off me, you scousgette. And I sit. I sit on my dad's knee and he reads me. He reads me. Today's Andy Capp Cilas is a constant. As the years pass, I'm taken as a tween less impressed by the penny arcade and the little van with raspberry ripple. And then I'm taken as a sullen teenager, a teenage goth in the 80s. I'm only there because I can't be trusted to have a house party if left alone. And I walk along the beach 20 meters behind my mum and dad, fuming that I'm not in Berlin with the Sisters of Mercy. In the late 80s, my parents splash out and they buy their very own static caravan. They spend every weekend on a beach. They walk their dogs, they listen to Foster and Alan on cd. They eat microwaved spaghetti hoops on Warburtons with Utterly Butterly. And then I'm there, back from uni, finding Sillers depressing, trapped in time and heroically quaint. And in the noughties. They have to get rid of the caravan and dad can't go anymore. He's got dementia. It's too much. And with my mom and her health, it's a bit too cold, but still. Sometimes we drive out there, we have chips and a walk, and we go very slowly along that seafront, holding Dad's hand so he can't get lost, suggesting to my mother that she uses her wheelchair, she won't be seen dead in one. She says someone might see her in it and thinks she can't walk anymore. And then with microwaved pots of spaghetti hoops eaten on toast one Saturday morning for breakfast, I load into the car with my two brothers, all of us older and greyer, and we head to Silleth and we park the car where the static caravan once was. And we walk over sand dunes and we walk over wet sand and we stare out far into the Irish Sea. And it's a blustery February day and we. We throw Mum and Dad's ashes into the wind and we just watch them and they just disappear in seconds. And life, it's impermanent. Everything changes. And I love tinned pasta because I like to cling to the small things that are constant. And that's it. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you, thank you. Sorry, it's a bit sad. I'm so sorry that.
