Monday 28 September 2009

A Case of Honest Theft

Eating in a restaurant in Dublin at the weekend, I was delighted to be served After Eight mints. I remembered fondly how sophisticated these chocolates seemed when I was a child.

So expensive and exclusive was the After Eight that most middle class families always seemed to have a half-empty box squirreled away in the sideboard somewhere, alongside the china and cutlery which were also reserved for special occasions. The box would come out only when honoured guests were visiting, and each diner would consume a single mint before the box was retired to the sideboard for the season. In those days a box would never - as now - be devoured in its entirety, the table deluged in a pile of spent paper wrappers.

I remember on one occasion we were visiting my parents' friends Peter and Margaret in Abingdon, and my brother and I were left in the company of their children, Katherine and Steven. After the usual tiresome day of discovering that none of us liked the same ball games and that computers still sucked, the four of us got to chatting about pulling off an elaborate After Eight heist which - in our heads - was about as daring as the Thomas Crown Affair. We drew diagrams on paper and worked out elaborate ways of sneaking past our mothers in the kitchen - crouching behind the armchair, taking it in turns to run from hiding spot to hiding spot - so that we could break into the dining room and help ourselves to the treasure chest of delicious mints that waited inside.

It was clear to us that our subtefuge would not go unnoticed for long, and for each mint we ate we insured our risks by placing a single penny piece in the empty black envelope and returning it to the box, in part payment for what we had consumed.

The weeks passed and the theft was only discovered the next time we were visiting, months later, when we children were awoken from our slumber upstairs by the roaring laughter of our drunken parents. We had, of course, wholly forgotten about the prank.

I recall on another occasion - when Margaret and Peter were visiting us - that Steven told me that tonic water tasted just like lemonade, and he encouraged me to steal some from the pantry. An impressionable wee dolt, I duly trotted into the kitchen, opened up the bottle and started pouring it directly into my mouth. I was not quite prepared for how effervescent tonic water can be, and the fluid erupted like a minature Vesuvious in my mouth and out in all directions across the kitchen.

The theft was on this occasion difficult to disguise, as my mum came racing into the room upon hearing the sound of her son's head being blown off, and found me standing drenched in the middle of the kitchen, an empty bottle in one hand and a dozen g&ts worth of tonic soaking into the carpet.

[Time: around 1986]

Thursday 17 September 2009

Scampi Fails The Pet Show

We were not allowed pets when I was very young - my father claimed that caging or domesticating animals was intensely cruel (although I suspect he just felt they were smelly) - but when I was around eight or nine, after many years of cajoling, I finally persuaded my parents to let me have a hamster. I guess my Dad reasoned it wouldn't take up too much space, or last for very long.

My mum took me to the Otley pet shop on Kirkgate where I selected a handsome, sand-coloured hamster. I named it after my favourite food at the time, Scampi, and carried it home in a small cardboard box. Scampi was a vivacious wee beastie and immediately set to work gnawing her way out through one of the airholes. By the time we'd reached the playpark opposite the Yew Tree she had her entire head through the hole, and my mum and I were forced into a clumsy gallop to get the hamster home before it made a full break for freedom.

Although hamsters are solitary creatures, after about a week we realised that Scampi had Known The Touch Of A Gentleman, as she suddenly gave birth to five babies. I suppose this explains why her body had been too fat to fit through the hole she'd gnawed in the cardboard box. Pet shops may look like prisons to us, but to hamsters its the equivalent of booze-fuelled week in Ibiza.

So, much to my father's dismay, I had in one year gone from having no pets at all to having six hamsters. Although they were all very cute bundled up together in their little nest, my mum learned from a piece of paper in the library (this was before the internet) that there comes a point in a Mother Hamster's life when she switches from feeding milk to her young, to feeding upon her young. This helps to explain why they are solitary creatures (indeed, I remember reading as a child that the hamster was for a long time presumed extinct, and that all domesticated hamsters descend from a single extant family which was found in a burrow in Syria. Superb timing - if the explorers had come a week later they might only have found a single, very fat hamster and the species would be lost).

We immediately launched a programme to rehouse the babies. My brother took one called Chips, Peter Jackson accepted Sherry and my arch-nemesis Sarah Parkar bought one for 50p which she mysteriously named Captain Scampi (the nautical theme still baffles me). Alistair Howtown bought the nicest one, but I cannot recall its name (as previously recorded, it was his white lie about this hamster's pregnancy which drove a wedge between us). The fifth we sold to a stranger recruited through a postcard placed in the newsagent's window (again, this was before the internet), and deep down inside me somewhere I can still feel the loss, and wonder what ever happened to that hamster (Solution: probably dead within 18 months). Each time I delved into Scampi's cage to steal another of her young to sell I felt like a Nazi raiding a Jewess's crib; however, I knew of course it was a necessary evil if she was not to make a meal of them herself.

Hamsters are relatively dull things so it's hard to dredge up many memories of what it was like to have Scampi in the year that followed. She crawled around on my arm of course, and occasionally ran up the sleeve of my jumper. She also ate sunflower seeds and drank water, and kept me awake at night by running on her wheel (as pets go, choosing a nocturnal rodent for a child who sleeps lightly is a bad choice).

Anyway, skip to the end: about a year and a half after Scampi gave birth, our Headmaster announced at assembly that there was to be a pet show on the Chevin. I was thrilled at the prospect of showing off my hamster and, as my parents were very indulgent, on the Saturday I found myself being driven up the Chevin, with Scampi in her cage on my lap. The Chevin is a huge valley wall which rises up on one side of Otley and utterly dominates the horizon. It's covered in forest, rocks and meadows and so was not the ideal place for a nine year old to be trotting in a hurry with an elderly hamster in a cage.

Sure enough, I tripped over a tree root and the whole cage went flying, crashing down in the dirt. I fished Scampi's body out of the remains. She was drenched from the explosion of her water bottle, and was breathing very heavily.

An organiser kindly loaned me a towel, and although I tried to dry Scampi out she still looked like a drowned rat. I took my place in the Pet Show barn, and watched as the judges went about their business inspecting vibrant and excitable animals of all sorts. Finally, a kindly judge came to me. "What have you got here, then?" he asked, peering at the drenched hamster which had by this point entered a coma from which she would never recover.

"My hamster, Scampi," I said proudly.

"Quiet little thing, isn't it?" he said archly before moving on, and by quiet I now realise he meant dead.

I went home distraught not to have won anything, but it was only the next day I realised something was seriously wrong with Scampi as she had still not woken up. She never did, and a day later I looked into her cage I saw her breathing had stopped, and a day after that the room was filled with that terrible sweet stench of decay and my mum insisted we bury her.

As is typical of nine year olds, I was utterly devastated and inconsolable until my mum suggested we go buy another one, at which point I was immediately thrilled. The replacement was a tortoisehell hamster called Brandy, who lived a long and happy life (that is for a hamster) until contracting cancer.

Cancer in hamsters is particularly unpleasant. The cells which make up a human are the same size as those which make up a hamster, so when hamster cells go cancerous the growth is just a voracious and yet relatively speaking far more destructive. Brandy grew a growth on his back half the size of his own body, a vile and crusty thing which leaked blood. My parents were incredibly indulgent about this too - the logical response would be stamp on it with your boot and toss it in the trash, but instead they indulged me with two trips to the vet for morphine injections to help him cope with the pain, before finally accepting the inevitable and allowing them to put the poor creature down.

We buried Brandy next to Scampi and Chips, followed by a good seasoning of cat pepper, and I haven't had the strength to buy another pet since.

Blood In The Streets

Until I joined the sixth form, I used to walk home for lunch every day and then walk back in for my afternoon lessons. This meant I could eat a much more pleasant sandwich than was available in the school canteen, as well as watch Puddle Lane on the television. The walk home was quite a slog, however, as my parents live at the top of an extremely long and steep hill. By the time I got to the top, I was in desperate need of that sandwich.

Walking back down the hill to school in 1989, I heard a bunch of teenage cyclists laughing as they free-wheeled down the hill on the neighbouring A-road at high-speed. The road runs parallel to my parent's street, and through a tree-lined snicket I could see them as they whizzed past me. "Look, no hands!" one was shouting proudly, with his hands in the air.

"I hope he fucking crashes and dies," I whispered hoarsely to myself (the observant reader might correctly deduct that I was a misanthope in my teens).

Well, the funny thing is that there was then a very loud bang, a portentous silence and lots of screaming and shouting. I ambled down to the bottom of the hill and turned the corner to see that this poor cyclist had ridden straight into a parked car at the bottom of the hill, and huge amounts of blood were pumping out of what remained of his face.

This was the first time I'd watched a person die. I arrived late at school that afternoon feeling a little shell-shocked. I could sense something had changed inside me, and looking back I realise that this was probably the day when I first gained a genuine insight into my own mortality. I'd learned that death comes suddenly and unannounced, and that one day I too would die. Although this was not a lesson I was likely to forget, I was reminded of it every day as I walked to school: for several weeks after his body had been cleared away, the spot where he had died was marked by the stain of his blood on the asphalt.

I swore off bicycling there and then, and didn't return to the saddle until six years later when I was a student in Cambridge, and even then I stayed off the main roads. I didn't return to cycling properly until my mid-20s, cycling to work from Peckham. That too came to an abrupt halt when an extremely old and frail woman was disoriented by my passing bicycle, and put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself. The above-mentioned observant reader will recall that a moving bicyclist is not a steady object and the poor woman tumbled into the road and started bleeding over her cardigan. I called an ambulance, cycled to work and that evening took my bicycle home on the train. And that was that for cycling in central London.

This is the second in a series of memories regarding horrific, fatal or disfiguring accidents which I wished for seconds before they occured. See also The Tar Pits of Otley.

[Time: around 1989]

Wednesday 9 September 2009

The Night I Was Eaten By a Pig

Just before the summer holidays of 1996 I was told I urgently needed to make up course credit before Michaelmas. I was required to do six weeks of fieldwork in order to enroll in my third year at Cambridge, which was a bother as I had by that point done fully none. Fortunately, one of my supervisors kindly agreed to let me join an archaeological field project in Denmark for four weeks, followed by two weeks of data inputting back in Cambridge.

The first I knew of this project was when I arrived back in Otley after a 36-hour coach journey home from Prague, only to find a telephone message waiting for me that I was due to be picked up in a mini-bus the following morning and shipped off to Denmark. I brushed my teeth, repacked my bag and after a brief nap was back out through the door on a 36-hour journey to Scandinavia.

It transpired the dig was being held on the small pig-farming island of Als, a rather desolate and isolated place that smelled, quite naturally, of pig shit. The dig was a cross-venture of the Universities of Durham and Southampton, and Jason Freeman was the only other person to come along from Cambridge. From Day 1 there was an obvious schism between the two main camps: Southampton archaeologists were crustys, who liked drinking cider and rolling their own cigarettes; while Durham archaeologists were yah-hoo henrys, who liked drinking wine and talking about their yacht club and ponies. I didn't fall into either group and so tried to be pleasant to everyone, which wasn't easy as they fought like bastards.

We were housed in a small sea-side youth hostel in the tiny hamlet of Hardeshøj, which comprised just two buildings: our hostel and (thank goodness) a pub. I was lucky enough to get a dormitory with only two others: Jason, the ultra-right religious nut I already knew; and Tim, a rather quiet yet dashing ginger gay. Over the course of the trip we together became so impossibly bored that I started holding eating compeitions with my dorm-mates in the middle of the night.

Jason and I would creep down to the kitchen and challenge ourselves to see how much yoghurt we could eat in one sitting. It was a matter of pride that we would together finish every last drop of yoghurt in the fridge, which was a sisyphean task as - seeing how popular yoghurt had been the night before - the trip organisers would order yet more each day. Tim and I would also and separately creep downstairs late at night (Jason hated Tim, unfortunately) for a special Danish fry up. Tim would take charge at the range, heating up a frying pan on each hotplate and then throwing a little bit of absolutely everything into the pans, and then seeing what turned out to be edible. Surprisingly little did, I'm sad to report.

The daytime food was also pretty awful, as the organisers had made the assumption that most of us would be vegetarian, whereas in actual fact only two people in the entire group were. Everyone had to take it in turns to stay home and cook (a great privilege, as it meant you weren't out digging in the dirt), but sadly it transpired that meat eaters in their early 20s are not the best people to ask to prepare dishes based solely around lentils. I recall my own concoction - sausage and lentil casserole - met with particular revulsion.

All this eating was, of course, just a small part of a day which was largely spent toiling in the fields. I spent the first half of the project digging what was believed to be a Bronze Age grave site. They had identified the spot the year before (this was a 30-year project to map the entire archaeology of the island), and the leader was certain that the large flat stones identified were marking graves. It was with some disappointment, then, that our excavation slowly revealed over the fortnight that they were ancient paving slabs with nothing of any consequence beneath them. It was all the more disappointing as this was not a rapid discovery. In archaeology one descends through the dirt a millimetre at a time, often with little more than a sturdy toothbrush to do your work. This was possibly one of the most mind-numbing activities I have ever engaged in.

An even more mind-numbing activity filled the second half of my stay on Als, when we were taught the beautiful art of fieldwalking. Each morning we were driven to a freshly-ploughed field, lined up one metre apart along one boundary and handed a plastic bag. Upon the leaders' instructions, we would then take a single and very dainty step forward every five minutes, spending the intervening time peering at the soil beneath us and trying to determine if we could see anything of much importance.

Fieldwalking was of course tedious when you didn't find anything (it is, after all, just mooching over dirt for 12 hours), but it was even more tedious when you did make a discovery. If you found anything at all, you were required to bag it up and then make a series of notes about its precise location. I could not bear this level of fastidiousness, and so I soon learned that upon finding a flint handaxe or arrow head the easiest possible solution was either to kick it under a convenient sod or - should the opportunity present itself - roll it into my neighbour's patch for them to deal with. The archaeological record of Als probably still show a series of perfectly blank corridors cutting across otherwise artefact-heavy fields.

Thinking back, I recall I did something similar during my excavation work. I had become very trowel-heavy in my frustration, digging through my trench at a centimetre an hour - a fair gallop in archaeological terms - and so was not paying much attention and one day found myself hacking through a piece of ancient pot. I realised that trying to explain the damage I had caused would only lead to a lot of trouble, so I simply hacked the pot into very tiny pieces and threw the lot onto the spoil heap and hoped no one would notice.

We were allowed occasional toilet breaks - the 'facilities' were the far side of the hedge - plus a coffee break in the morning, half an hour for lunch and then a tea break in the afternoon. It was during these periods that we discovered one of the few forms of stimulation during our day: the electric fence. We would take it in turns to hold onto to the wires and giggle as the charge tickled its way through our palms. This is possibly the lowest level to which I have ever stooped.

Naturally, not everyone was as negative as I. Indeed, some of them actually enjoyed archaeology. It was therefore perhaps a shame that of all the days a Danish journalist might visit Hardeshøj to cover our project, they chose to come on a day when I was home on dinner duty. It was up to me and a small Romanian girl from Durham to represent the combined archaeological departments of Cambridge, Durham and Southampton to the world. I still have the clipping, and although it's in Danish I remember very distinctly how angry my supervisor was with what I'd said. "Archaeology is very slow," I recall her translating, "so it's hard to bother doing it properly." Another piece of wisdom was, "I'm not sure what we've found here on Als, but it's certainly not worth talking about in your paper."

We had one day off a week, and it was important we spent it wisely. The youth hostel was next to a small ferry terminal, and we wasted our first day off by taking the ferry back to the mainland and discovering there wasn't a town there either. On future days off we visited the two local towns on the island, the imaginatively named Nordborg in the north and Sonderborg in the south. Sonderborg was by far the most exciting, but was also too distant to be practical. Nordborg had a post office, a bar and a telephone booth, so we spent a lot of time queuing there and taking it in turns to talk to family.

The evenings on a work day were mind-numbing, often spent sitting out in the garden playing stupid games (I recall breaking a game of I Have Never by asking, "Is fucking a dead foal necrophilia, bestiality or paedophilia?", which had the Durham students hooting and the Southampton oiks non-plussed), enjoying massive rows between the two factions, or else going to the tavern next door where a glass of beer could be had for around £4. A girl from Durham - Eleanor - took a particular fancy to me, and declared herself my wife. I generally accepted this, since this meant I had more friends (including the yacht-loving Imogen from the Isle of Wight, and the minor aristocrat Antonia Castor).

Jason left after two weeks to join an altenative dig in Greece, and without my regular yoghurt sessions the constant drag of work soon made me quite depressed. One evening - after field walking in the pouring rain, during which time my boots became caked in so much mud you could have spent four weeks excavating my feet - I found myself again sitting in the miserable bar in Hardeshøj with the Durham crowd, after another huge argument with Southampton, drinking expensive beer and talking crap. I decided I just needed to get away from it all and get some distance, and so I simply walked out of the bar without a word, and walked off down the road and didn't stop until I'd reached Nordborg (only 4.3 miles, according to Google).

I hadn't expected this to cause any trouble at all. I mean, surely it was acceptable to go for a stroll in the evening? Instead, alas, Eleanor became extremely panicked. We had recently learned that a wild boar had escaped from a nearby farm and - while no one had claimed it was dangerous - after an hour of absence Eleanor was convinced the beast had attacked and eaten me. It cannot have taken her more than five minutes to rouse the entire archaeological team and convince them that my mutilated and half-eaten corpse lay somewhere in the dark.

As I returned along the road to Hardeshøj, therefore, I met a large delegation coming the other way. Search parties had been dispatched along the major roads, while others were walking the coast in search of my bloated corpse. I cannot have been gone more that a couple of hours. One of the trip organisers, a kindly and rotund woman, bundled me into her car. "You've caused a lot of trouble," she said. I couldn't help feeling I had caused nothing at all, but I knew it would not help to argue. I returned to Hardeshøj and Eleanor gave me a huge hug.

"I'm glad you weren't eaten by a pig," she said, with greater sincerity than that sentance deserves.

As it happens, the wild boar showed up a few days later. I was washing up dishes in the kitchen, looked out of the window and saw a man apparently pointing a shot gun at me. I screamed, and he aimed and fired. It turned out the pig was on our lawn, and I rushed out to see the poor creature bleeding to death, before a couple of farm hands turned up and together the men bled the creature onto the grass and then cut open its belly and tore out its guts to stop them spoiling the meat. Our lovely lawn - where we had lain chatting in the sun - was turned into a blood-drenched battle field strewn with offal.

We were given free sausages to make up for the trouble.

A few days later I was washing up, looked out of the window and saw three men with machine guns peering at me through the window. I rushed outside to see what was happening and discovered around two dozen fully armed soldiers hiding round the back of the house. I demanded to know what was going on but they weren't allowed to tell me, but they were all rather handsome so I brought out a couple of boxes of wine and a pleasant afternoon was had in the sun. Alas, they were mostly interested in our glamorous Swedish colleague Marika, who specialised in excavating mass graves and had tits like watermelons, so I saw no action that evening.

The field trip seemed to last forever and the Durham crew disappeared home before the final week, so I was left pretty much on my own. During the final week I prayed to Imaginary God every night that time would speed up so I could go home, but alas with so few archaeologists on the team now - and with the Bronze Age graveyard revealed as a patio - the only work to be done was fieldwalking, and so the passing of every day felt like a year.

When I was finally allowed home, I wept with joy. To this day, I cannot pass a freshly ploughed field without wincing.

[Time: Summer 1996]

Fraudulent First Prize At The Otley Show

When I was aged seven or eight, as with any healthy country boy, I became obsessed with winning a prize in the Women's Institute bakery competition at the Otley Show.

The Otley show was an annual event which had presumably started as an agricultural enterprise - farmers showing off the robustness of their cow's udders, the obesity of their sheep and the sexual prowess of their pigs - but by the early 1980s had become a rather down-at-heel fun fair by the river, with the usual side attractions of hot-dog stands, reconstructions of medieval jousting, collections of rusting steam engines (that no one seemed to have any affection for) and far away in one tight little corner a couple of sad pigs beside a display of rosettes from happier times.

The bakery competition fascinated me, as it seemed so unlikely that people would really take cake so seriously. I set my sights on the 'Edible Animal' competition, which required the competitor to craft a convincing replica of any animal from purely edible items. I could really have chosen anything - a snake might have been easy, or some sort of amoeba - but I was determined from the start that only a biscuit hedgehog could truly triumph in this competition. I'm sure my mum sighed with relief that I didn't fixate on something more complex.

My mother sourced a reliable biscuit recipe from Mrs Gibbon up the road (yes, Colin's mum) and on the Friday night before the competition we made up a huge batch of mixture, turned it out onto the counter and styled it into a rudimentary egg shape, before slashing the rear with scissors to create the illusion of spikes and pushing two raisins in for its eyes.

I don't exagerrate when I say that the hedgehog was a masterpiece when it went into the oven, and it was only when it came that I realised an awful culinary truth: the biscuit is by nature a flat beast. They settle and subside in the oven. My beautiful hedgehog thus came out looking like it had been flattened by a tractor.

My mother came to the rescue and sourced a bread recipe, and we quickly mixed up the ingredients and I again I styled the mixture into the perfect similacrum of a hedgehog before placing it in the oven. Alas, I was to discover yet another culinary truth: bread by its very nature rises in the oven. My beloved creation came out looking like the bloated corpse of a hedgehog drowned in the river.

Being a child, bedtime was early and I could really only afford to have two baking disasters before retiring for the evening. I went to my bed in a state of distress - I had already bragged to my friends that I would see victory at the Women's Institute the following day, and I knew it would be humiliating to turn up with nothing to show for my promises.

Fortunately my mum did not give up easily, and she toiled throughout the night to produce yet a third hedgehog. She used an unleavened scone recipe to style a hedgehog in the precise format of my prototypes, and in the morning I found a perfect bready hedgehog waiting for me in the kitchen. My mood changed instantly, and once I'd knocked up some grass for him to sit on - stirring green food colouring into dessicated cocoanut - the illusion was complete.

As we walked down to the Otley Show, I was convinced that victory would be mine. Alas, we arrived to discover that my arch-nemesis Sarah Parkar had also entered the competition, and her contribution was far and away better than mine. I can no longer recall what her entry was, but for the purposes of the memory project we'll say it was a beautiful model of an elephant carved out of marzipan and icing sugar.

We each placed our entries down on the trellis table and left while the Learned Judges of the Womens Institute did their work. I was extremely tense, but tried to enjoy the entertainments on offer: the dodgem cars which always broke down; the stall where you could win a dying goldfish in a plastic bag; and the joke toy van where I almost bought a model turd with a fly on it on the misunderstanding it was a comedy doughnut (my mind, I fear, was by this point bakery obesessed).

Eventually, my parents tentatively led me back into the cake tent to see how I had done. The trellis table was covered in hundreds of entries and I quickly realised that the odds were against me. I struggled to find my own contribution, but came first upon Sarah Parkar's effort, the fabulous sugar elephant with its trunk raised triuphantly in the air. Unsurprised, I saw that sitting beside it was a judges' card. So she had won. My heart sank.

I turned to leave the tent, but my mum stopped me. The judges' card had actually indicated a disqualification. Apparently, the rules stiuplated that an 'edible animal' could not simply be sculpted from sugar paste, it had to be something one would actually happily eat. I was immensely grateful, but then cursed when I saw that my entry also had a red card placed beside it. I went to collect my hedgehog and take it home to hide my shame, when I realised this was a different card. This was First Prize.

I was thrilled beyond description, and spent the rest of the day on a high. I refused my father's suggestion that we all sit down and eat my hedgehog and defended it absolutely, although I have a very distinct memory of clandestinely chewing on the grim and fibrous cocoanut grass that the hedgehog sat upon.

After a week or two, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided I could not go to the grave without knowing how my winning hedgehog had tasted. I turned him over to take a nibble from beneath - so as not to destroy his beauty - and discovered with horror that his undercarriage had turned mouldy. I tried to disguise this from my mother, however she soon discovered the decay and I was marched outside to pose for photographs with my hedgehog in the garden before it was dumped unceremoniously into the dustbin.

Future generations examining the photograph might forever have assumed I was a master baker had I not today revealed the terrible fraud that my mother and I perpetrated on the Women's Institute that day. For of course, it was really my mother - not I - who had baked that winning hedgehog.

[Time: anywhere between 1982 and 1988, I have no real idea]