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by
Grace Dent
An apple pip we find on the floor, both rolling our eyes in agreement that my mam’s hoovering skills can’t be up to much. We’ll mention her slackness to her when she returns from driving Grandad to dominos at the Working Men’s Club and has got all our teas on.
It is hard, perhaps, for some younger people nowadays to understand a world where no one mentioned further education to the lower classes, ever. Not once. Not even in passing.
Still, despite doing well in school, by the age of eleven I’d seen almost none of the classic children’s books that make those broadsheet ‘100 Best …’ lists each year: A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit. Those tomes that apparently enrich the soul. I’d never heard of Dickens, Shakespeare or Tolkien. I knew nothing of Greek mythology or been tipped off that Latin was even a thing. The stuff you need a smattering of if you want to pass as posh.
But that’s generally always the lower middle classes, for whom pedantry is their affliction; an inability to stop pointing out minor errors in people with less bright starts, before basking for the rest of the chat in a dank pool of bad feeling.
When Heston Blumenthal shows up making a risotto with a Dyson Airblade and a conical flask of formaldehyde, I still think: Use a pan, mate. Stop dicking about.
School dinners were where an entire generation of working-class kids learned that beige food is a blanket of happiness to snuggle around you on an otherwise shitty school day.
we remember not knowing things: how the definitive answer to the question we had in the shower that morning was probably on the top floor of a library in New York and we’d never know within our whole lifetime.
I’d begun to see that eating out was every bit as much fun as pubbing or clubbing or partying. It was maybe more fun.
The wound I have about Dad only ever seems to grows the slenderest of scabs. The merest memory makes it bleed.
Because in the moments when he recognises me, he is Dad. He’s there. His facial muscles – very briefly – arrange themselves how they once did. But then he’s gone again. It’s over. And having him back for a few seconds just leaves me sore.
