The Landlady does breakfast over a shampoo & set
I am currently on one of my bi-annual trips to the North of England to visit some of my surviving friends and relatives, most of them as mad as a box of frogs, in one way or another. Since I have arrived, my old, rather ugly city has been basking in temperatures of 32 degrees, and were it not for all of the ill-placed dual carriageways and derelict pottery factories, one could almost squint and imagine oneself to be in St Tropez. My old village, which was always something of a hidden beauty, is resplendent in its green spaces and award-winning gardens. The trees and vegetation, which were enormous when I left home 30 years ago, are now gargantuan, making the open spaces look like something from Valley Of The Dinosaurs.
It is something of a relief that there is a swanky new bus station in Stoke-On-Trent because the old one was a gathering-place for one-eyed people with cans of Tenants Super who passed the time mainly beating the crap out of each-other. I asked my friend Sue, who is a psychiatric nurse in a men’s rehab centre (and thus on first name terms with most of the participants), where all the drunkards had gone and she claimed, not without a hint of irony, that they were probably still at the old bus station round the corner, unaware that there was now a new one. Well, I suppose catching buses was not their main priority.
“On Friday mornings in Stoke-on-Trent, everyone over 70 has their shampoo and set”
On Friday mornings in Stoke-on-Trent, everyone over 70 has their shampoo and set (I am reliably informed that this is a nationwide tradition, kept alive by the generation sporting the hairdo that we whipper-snappers used to refer to as ‘mum-hair’). Due to the fact that most of the people I know fall into the categories of being too old to drive, or have had their licences removed, because they are a liability on the tarmac, everyone congregates at my Auntie G’s house at 10am precisely. Then the hairdresser, who is the ex-girlfriend of auntie G’s 41-year-old son, arrives to do everyone’s ‘mum hair’. By arriving at 11am for a cup of tea, I managed to kill three old people with one stone, and say hi to the 41-year-old son, who I hadn’t seen since he was 11 and therefore momentarily assumed to be his own father…
At lunchtime, I went to Auntie M’s house, and she insisted on having a full English breakfast, because she hadn’t yet had her breakfast. The following day, I spent the day with Aunty D, who has short-term memory problems and for whom cooking a meal is always a pantomime accompanied by an orchestra of alarms and timers, none of which she can remember what’s for. As we ate our cooked breakfast on Saturday morning, she claimed that she normally ate it on Friday night, because she didn’t have time on Friday morning because the hairdresser came… I don’t think I can face a cooked breakfast for a while.
