by Alan Davies
The house lights came on after the encore with the hot and happy crowd still banging their feet and yelling ‘More!’ before relenting to spill euphorically out into the night. My ears were ringing from the music.
It had been snowing and was icy underfoot. The tubes had stopped running out to Essex. I managed to catch a bus as far as Chingford Station which was about two and a half miles from home. I rang my dad and told him where I was, hoping he’d come and pick me up. He said: ‘It’s just a brisk jog from there.’ Maybe I’d woken him and he’d forgotten that we had moved from Chingford to Loughton thirteen years before. Rangers Road, between the two, had no pavement, no streetlights and went straight through pitch black Epping Forest. Halfway home, tripping and slipping along an icy path that I couldn’t see, a police car pulled up.
‘Are you all all right?’ said one of the policemen.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
I was fifteen, communicating with authority figures was a weakness. I should have said: ‘Please help me. I can’t see anything, I can’t feel my toes. I’ve still got two miles to go. If I twist my ankle I could die of exposure. Help me!’
The other one said: ‘Where are you going?’
‘Home,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said and they drove off. Towards Loughton.
The following week I came out of a great U2 concert, at the Lyceum, into similar snow. This time the tube unexpectedly stopped at Leytonstone. There were going to be no more trains to Loughton that night. I went up to the street to wait for a 20a. An hour later I was still there. The buses had stopped running and no one had told anyone. Snow was falling heavily. I went into a phone box and smoked a cigarette for warmth. Six miles from home and frozen, I rang the police and told them I was stuck. They said I should walk a mile and a half down the hill to Red-bridge roundabout where there was a minicab office. I had to sneak into my dad’s room to find some cab fare without waking him up. He woke up and was livid. It was 2 a.m.
Despite the torturous journeys home, which I remember as well as the gigs, they were two nights that were rarely bettered in my teens.
A year later I went to see U2 again. This time they had flags flying and were singing passionately about Bloody Sunday. I bought the third album, War, but never liked it as much as the first two, Boy and October, so lost interest in them. They’re still going I believe.
Ronald McDonald
On 28 March 1979 the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania suffered a severe core meltdown, leading to an evacuation of pregnant women and pre-school children over a five-mile radius. Fortunately, radiation emissions from the plant were relatively low, but the accident had many consequences. Safety procedures, and core monitoring, were improved across all reactors in the USA, but public opinion turned against nuclear energy.
More than a decade previously, McDonald’s Research and Development personnel began work on a product that could retain intense heat. This achievement in heat generation and its subsequent retention was unparalleled in scientific history, until the accident that led to half of the TMI-2 plant’s core melting down.
The substance McDonald’s had developed became the filling in what was marketed as a deep-fried ‘Apple Pie’. Encased not in zirconium cladding, preferred by the nuclear industry at the time for the storing of nuclear fuel pellets, these pies were sheathed in simple heat-resistant card. The make-up of the pastry case, which completely enclosed the filling in much the same way as the containment walls at TMI-2 enclosed the melting core, remains secret. The pie’s exterior, or room, temperature was cool to the touch giving an impression of edibility to the hungry McDonaldite. The moment the pastry exterior was pierced the molten fluid within rushed out, as if from a depressurized aircraft cabin, scalding and blistering tongue, gums, the roof of the mouth, anything in its path. The safest option, now widely accepted, is to break the pie and test the temperature with an extremity whilst at all times keeping the number of a good burns unit to hand.
The remarkable pastry, known to some as Pa-styrene or Polysty-stry, has unlimited potential for further development, as a lining for microwave ovens.
The first bite into a McDonald’s hamburger I ever had came on a family holiday to America in the summer of 1981.
It was lush.
There was something in there I’d never come across before, a tangy flavour my taste buds had never previously had the pleasure of. I peeled back the bun to see what it was that could be giving this burger its unique specialness. There was the ‘all-beef patty’, there was the tomato sauce but there was something else in there, something green. A slice of vegetable. With flavour.
It was a gherkin.
I’d never had a gherkin before and considered this to be an ingredient included by a culinary superhero. Did Ronald himself come up with the gherkin?
It’s possible that, at the time of the gherkin experience, I’d never before had anything pickled. Other than beetroot. There was always a jar of beetroot in the fridge. I’m never without it to this day.
My gran grew beetroot in her back garden. I watched her grabbing one out of the earth with her bare hands. She had dug for victory in the ’40s. She made her own dumplings too and could bake for Blighty. All this was passed on to her daughters, my mum and aunt. Growing up in a haze of icing sugar and flour, I waited around the kitchen for the chance to lick the cake whisk and scrape out the mixing bowl, like a cat hanging around on the off chance a can of fish might be opened.
Our garden was replete with blackberries and apples. All through the autumn there was stewed blackberry and apple, blackberry and apple pie, apple pie, stewed apple, apple sauce. Not to mention the rhubarb (don’t eat the leaves!), stewed or put into a crumble. If there were more blackberries (and the more we picked the more there seemed to be) there might be jam making. What a physical effort this was. To sit in the kitchen, just me and my mum (brother at school, sister yet to walk), and witness the straining and pushing, the heat and the steam of the jam making process was to sit at the heart of the family. Then all the little jam tarts went in the oven and there followed a great test of infant patience, once they were out, as they cooled down.
At the greengrocer’s, an old holdall would be filled with muddy spuds, clouds of used farm earth dusting up the air at toddler level, before bags of carrots and sprouts were filled, and twirled at either end, while lifted in arc of performance-grocering.
Into the butcher to witness the strong-arm turn-handle mincing of something pink. No idea, until it was on the table in front of me, that it meant shepherd’s pie for tea.
All the time we were out shopping, there was the chance that my mum’s skirt would pull up alongside another skirt on Loughton High Road, and I’d have to wait for a bit until they’d finished whatever it was they did up there. If it went a little too long, this high-in-the-sky-above talk, then I’d be forced to tug at the skirt to hurry things along. Not that I had any pressing engagements, being four. Or three? I may have been five or even six. No more than that though, because at six she was gone, and all those steak and kidney pies and casseroles and the jam and those little tarts, they were gone too.
Since my mum went before we owned a freezer, and before Bejam appeared on Loughton High Road, it’s hard to say whether she would have embraced the convenience of the frozen life or not. Would Mozart have used a synthesizer or Sophocles a laptop? As Patrick Moore would say: ‘We just don’t know.’
The answer is probably yes, though. The freezer and then the microwave changed everything and mums across England, raised in make-do-and-mend, Dig For Victory, wartime austerity, were bending with the times, though it must have felt wrong, wrong, wrong. Food in a box? In a sealed plastic bag? It certainly led to more peas on our plates with all that shelling a thing of the past. As an infant I had my mum’s home-grown runner beans but after the freezer came along there were Bird’s Eye peas a-go-go, not to mention fish fingers and the promised land of boil-in-thebag fish, and casseroles.
Bejam wa
s a room full of chest freezers. None of them had glass tops and they were not well labelled, but the regular customer with a keen memory could find processed meat, and more importantly Arctic Roll, without opening and closing endless lids. I did the searching for my dad. No more butcher, no more baker, never a candlestick maker, greengrocer not long for this world and no more chit-chat with busy skirts on the High Road. Bejam’s for your frozen food and Sainsbury’s for your spuds, baked beans, biscuits and Battenberg. Milk, eggs and bread delivered, all done.
Going by the names on the packets, the food sounded as though it would be the same. It just had ‘frozen’ in front of it. Frozen carrots. Same as carrots. Just frozen. If you boiled them, for a long time, they’d taste the same too. They’d both taste of nothing. And did we boil in England? Why certainly. All vegetables were boiled. Quite often the meat was boiled too. All the nutrients in England were boiled into pans of water and poured into England’s drains. Peas were boiled in a pan, with a mountain of mini-bubbles rising out of it and, on top of them, a green spot, where the weaker peas who couldn’t keep it together surfaced as pulp.
The boiling was a tradition and the frozen food manufacturers knew it. Cooking instructions: BOIL. At best: BOIL, then simmer.
The boiling away of flavour aided the transition, from a nation fed primarily on fresh produce to one fed primarily on frozen produce. Every vegetable, frozen or otherwise, carrot, bean, cabbage, spinach, broccoli, or cauliflower, tasted of nothing without gravy (all my meals for a large part of my childhood tasted only of gravy). So long as the same gravy was poured over the frozen food as was poured over the real food then the adjustment was small. The frozen food was close enough to the real thing that it made it worth cutting out the effort of preparing actual food. The art of eking out the remnants of a Sunday joint over a week slowly disappeared along with the joint itself. With sliced beef available in frozen tin foil cartons, the Sunday knife sharpening ritual, standing over the roast, became a thing of the past.
All this, like nylon sheets, was an improvement. Now we could have things easily that we hadn’t had before and one of the things that we liked the most was a Bejam frozen beefburger. These were designed for the palate of children. Salty with no gristle and no fat on the edge. Easy to cut, easy to chew and equally good with ketchup or gravy. Any meal that could bring ketchup to the table was a good meal. Kids like ketchup. It’s a sugar feast, working its neo-addictive magic on junior tastebuds over school-night teas all year round.
Ketchup, of course, was born in the USA. Cheap-as-chips fly-drive holidays had opened up the magnificence of the United States to lucky, well-off-enough package holiday makers like us. It was the last time we went on a trip as a family and it was the time that first-ever McDonald’s burger was sampled.
Starting on the West Coast and travelling via Santa Monica, Disneyland, Universal Studios, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and then across to New York and Washington DC made for a hectic three weeks but it was the trip of a lifetime. There were certain things that had to be done. We flew in a light aircraft over the Canyon, we rode Space Mountain and saw Jaws leap out of the water at us. We went across the Golden Gate Bridge and sailed across to the island prison to see where Al Capone was held (and to buy a ‘property of Alcatraz’ T-shirt). We went up the Statue of Liberty, up the Empire State Building and up the now vanished World Trade Center and then we stood at Lincoln’s giant feet and read the Gettysburg Address.
All the way across America we ate burger after burger after burger. Our palates had been transformed through the late ’70s into processed-food processors. Familiar, now, with sausages every morning that had no skins, snatched from the freezer, sharply separated and grilled in non-splitting non-spitting sedate factory food fashion.
So we were ready for McDonald’s. We wanted our food in a thick paper bag just as we secretly wanted our groceries in thick brown handle-free paper bags like they had on American TV shows of which we still could not get enough. In Santa Monica we bought a map showing where the stars lived. My dad chose Robert Wagner for Davies family surveillance. We pulled up a discreet distance from what was allegedly Bob’s place and waited, eyes fixed on the front door. Minutes ticked by, then, success, a delivery arrived. Had it been a high-powered rifle, for taking pot-shots at stalking tourists, no court in California would have convicted Bob Wagner. The front door opened, my dad strained to see. The person who opened the door was not coming out.
‘Is it him? Can you see?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well look. Is it him?’
He was surprisingly agitated. My dad, not Robert Wagner. The door closed. We didn’t see who’d opened it. We were truly wasting our lives, so we went for a McDonald’s instead.
Lining up excitedly, we scanned the board for the options, seduced by the accents, the odd ordering of words in their sentences, the ubiquitous, ‘Have a nice day!’ My dad asked us what we wanted. He was in charge of ordering. I was fifteen. I knew I should be doing the ordering. I knew he’d be the slowest there that day. The slowest ever. This was someone who grew up in an age when the food cooked for a long time. When you could smell the stewing or roasting meat for an age, before you were dispatched to a sink to wash your hands so you were fit to eat it. There was a chance he’d take so long over it the staff would change shifts halfway through. I decided to help him. By muttering things.
The order did take a while:
‘One hamburger please.’
‘Fries with that?’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Do you want fries?’
‘Fries with that?’
‘Chips, yes, please.’
‘Small, regular or large?’
‘Medium, please.’
‘Regular.’
‘So that’s one burger, one regular fries, anything else?’
‘Yes, one quarter pounder with cheese, please.’
‘It’s supposed to be fast food.’
‘Fries?’
‘Yes, please, medium fries please.’
‘You don’t have to say please every time.’
‘One Big Mac.’
That one was said with a hint of John Wayne in his voice.
‘Why are you doing the accent?’
‘And another hamburger, please, with fries.’
‘Regular?’
‘Yes, three Coca-Colas and one cup of tea, please.’
‘It’s McDonald’s cola. Is that OK for you?’
‘What? I don’t know. Is it the same?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘It’s McDonald’s cola, is that OK?’
‘Just say yes.’
‘Yes. And a tea, please.’
‘Small, regular or large cola?’
Thanks in no part to my essential interventions, we eventually gathered up our food. It was unwrapped with an eagerness usually reserved for Christmas morning. It took less than a generation to wean a nation off real food and on to fake food and we were proudly in the vanguard!
Everything was processed and chemicalized so that the meat taste in our mouths was not the taste of meat. It was the taste of a laboratory. There was no discernible nutritional value that couldn’t be replicated by eating the wrapping. As for the wrapping, we shovelled a mountain of plastic and paper in to their mammoth in-store repository. Happiness achieved, childlike palates sated, we could not wait for the next one.
That little bit of Gherkin In The Machine was the nicest thing there. The tastiest vegetable I’d eaten in my life. Unboiled, semi-raw and hiding in a food factory. It was like the little plant that WALL-E finds, the last green thing on Earth after it’s been trashed. My gran may well have pulled it out, eaten it, and given the rest to her long-suffering cat.
Paul Weller
Vinyl Scrapyard was a second-hand record shop situated on the long downhill street that Walthamstow Market occupied and close enough to Walthamstow Central station that anyone arriving there from Loughton on the 20
bus to catch the tube to Arsenal could easily pop in for a snout round. I was usually after old Stranglers LPs
I had just bought their TheMeninBlack album. It was full of melodic keyboard arrangements with an oddly ethereal atmosphere intended to evoke alien life forms playing the piano and making up songs. Signing up for the Stranglers Appreciation Society, I began to receive their magazine, Strangled. Inside were equally ethereal articles about the mysterious Men in Black who control our planet, with their special knowledge of other worlds and other life forms.
Later the brilliant film-maker John Sayles, famous for gritty authentic tales of the American Dream gone sour, directed a comedy called Brother from Another Planet in which an alien, who happens to look like an Afro-American, ends up in Harlem and finds employment in a bar where he fixes fruit machines by closing his eyes and leaning on them. Eventually two Men in Black arrive to return him from whence he came. The Brother, by now, has discovered a world of illegal aliens in New York, not to mention some high-level drug trading and corruption. It’s a good film but was principally of interest to me because of those pesky Men in Black the Stranglers had been on about. Subsequently, the movies Men in Black and MIB 2 have shown a further comedic version of secret service types in black suits secretly protecting us all from the aliens amongst us. Then The Matrix trilogy drew heavily on the Men in Black idea, as multiple versions of Smith pursued Neo through a world that wasn’t as it appeared to the populace.
The Stranglers were now my favourite band and, like Mulder in the X Files, I wanted to believe. However, having found some old LPs in Vinyl Scrapyard, I found that this Men in Black stuff was a recent interest. They had been at the forefront of punk rock and as such had been obliged to believe in nothing other than belligerent, rebellious posturing. Their old albums, like No More Heroes and Black & White, were potent, but they were old. It was while I was hunting for a copy of The Raven (with a hologrammed sleeve) that I came across an imported single by The Jam that I hadn’t seen before. ‘That’s Entertainment’ with a live version, from a gig in Germany, of ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ on the B side. I’d heard of this tube station song (it had been released as a single in 1978) but I’d never listened to it before. This imported version became the most played of all my records.