Mostly I'm managing to resist feeling nostalgic, but occasionally it creeps up on me. At the point where it mentions Players Number 6 cigarettes, I suddenly longed to be sucking one of those fags that I gave up twenty-odd years ago, the very cigarettes that got me into the big C club.
And there's a great passage in the book where they eat dinner in a pub:
They ordered food.
Lasagna, an avalanche of white sauce tearing down the glen.
Chips piled high as Stirling Castle.
A loch of baked beans.
Lumps of steak pie; livid red meat, clammy puff pastry.
Potatoes boiled down to silt.
Scampi chunks, breathless on kitchen roll, heaped in a
buff-coloured basket, the breadcrumbs orange.
A puddle of peas.
And a gammon steak that looked sore. It looked red and sore, like one of their faces, a half pineapple-ring set in the middle, a yellow-toothed grin. The plate was a mirror: the man was eating his own Scots face.
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I'm a fortunate man - I survived the Scottish diet and the big C, outlived my own father, and escaped to New South Caledonia to go bananas.
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