My parents entertained seldom, being shy, very, but most people in our road were just like them only with bigger or littler noses and hopes the same way. They woke then worked. Then they ate and admired sunsets. The same sunsets.
It was the ridiculously simple routine of daily life that sent my mum crazy; she took Bex, Aspros and Vincent's Powders that she slid pinkly down her teeth mixed with Myra Plum Jam 'to take the taste away', and fled the dreary scene that way with some more fascinating interior view of existence that got flattened out flatter than the pikelets she made on a flour-board made of tough white plastic.
My main memory of the growing-up teenage years is of her baking lots of moist or very dry fruitcakes, depending upon what drugs she was taking and their influence. Her good ones required lots of hard vigour; here's how she did them thirty-five years back.
First she got big bowls out and rinsed them very clean with lots of boiling hot water. Then she dried each with a crisp tea towel until each was gleaming in its way, with a kind of sparkle. She rested the bowls on the stainless steel sink and patted down a few clean pages of The Herald newspaper on her limited work-bench. Upon this she set the packets of O-So-Lite Flour.
Extract from Unparalleled Sorrow by Barry Dickens.
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