Chestnut Tree Cafe

Do you know the ‘So what?’ game? I call it that because a supervisor once said that about a publication of mine and later I had occasion to play this game with him, and others, and he asked me what it was called. I can’t remember who first showed me the game but it is a marvellous trip into hopefully subconscious associations with virtually everything in our environment. There is a list of categories and you have to write down the example of the category that reminds you of freedom and then at the end you all compare. Categories include building, country, material etc but also vegetable and fruit. An erstwhile lover of mine chose pea and apple. I like to think I can follow his logic. Maybe the song tells of meatballs rolling from the plate but the British obsession with frozen peas at every meal leads to adeptness in managing the little green monsters. They can be skewered but this is quite a slow method of intake. Viscous gravy, usually on the menu in not-so-posh establishments is a great help of course I expect a nice fruit coulis performs the same function especially at Christmas but the only sure fire way to minimise loss is of course the shovel technique.

But then again perhaps there is freedom in the crowd – peas in a pod and I’m one of them, part of the team. Apple one can imagine harks back to William Tell or less obtusely simply to the childhood of British people of a certain age, from which we remember the delight of picking an apple from the tree in the garden – or stealing into the orchard next door for an armful, and yes they did taste different although the typical garden variety is now back in some supermarkets. I think I choose different ‘freedom’ foods each time I play but I know artichoke is one of my favourites because it is essentially a weed or wild plant and it doesn’t lend itself to easy eating – clever artichoke, a mouthful of those hairs and you know you have paid the price for plucking the fruit.

Shelling peas
I loved the house I lived in from the ages 5-8, especially the garden, a rockery broke down onto the lawn and beyond that was a summerhouse and beyond that a disused veg patch – just like in the ‘Famous Five’ and such books of bourgeois childhood adventure. In summer I would often sit on the back door step shelling peas for my mother for tea. I suppose on the back step I was free to daydream, at least I wasn’t ‘under my mother’s feet’ as she liked to remind me. But it there was something more sensorial too. The gentle drumming noise of the peas as they rolled into the colander, the crunch of the pod and the smell of the juice; popping the peapods still gives me this thrill and I have also retained a life-long pleasure in stoop-sitting. Perhaps this merely reflects my over willingness to watch the world go by (Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat style).

Slightly before the bread and coffee diet in my teens, I went to Denmark with a friend. We were fifteen. I can only think that the world must have been very different then. We were exceptionally sensible but we still managed to stay in a hostel in Copenhagen with a unisex sauna (which wild horses wouldn’t have dragged us into having seen the men coming out!) and stay overnight in a railway station at the northern most point. I remember a fish stew served by friends of my parents that made little impression on me. But other Danish meals we largely deprived ourselves of due to the packets of Ryvita we had brought with us and rationed so harshly that we had some left at then end of two weeks.

I remember sitting outside a Yorkshire pub on a cold dark night with another mum with two pints of beer, three small but lively boys, and five portions of chips. Her son asked me what it was like to be posh, or at any rate without a clipped dialect. I said it’s comfortable but it isn’t always fun. When I was a child we were only allowed fish and chips in an emergency. At which he gasped. The occasions I remember were either when there was a well prepared plan in execution ‘thurs the removal men come and when they leave at 6-7 you go and get fish and chips etc.’ or in times or real emergency, unexpected calamity, domestic floods, etc. But maybe for that reason, to this day fish and chips are the last resort and ultimate comfort for me. In the sense that nothing can ever be that bad if you can go out and fill up with warm, greasy, soggy, crunchy, fishy, potatoey fish n chips.