food of our fathers + HNT

I'm reading a book by Andrew O'Hagan, called Our Fathers. It's about a middle-aged Scots exile who returns to Scotland. It's partly a story of cruel drunken fathers and unforgiving sons. The characters are working-class catholics, and my family were middle-class protestants, but otherwise it's like my former life.

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.

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.

If you're desperate, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts here.