Interestingly, and a per pro nothing in particular, Greg's Heart Recipe was dropped from the Masterchef cook book when it was pointed out by a reader its artichokes that have hearts not potatos and the addition of 5 killos of sugar to the golden syrup mix was a misprint, it should have read 6 killos and a bucket of cream. Greg was "...gutted." Well you know how much he likes his pud, he tells us every sodding week.
Mmmm caffeine... where was I? That's right, just about to land in Mumbai.
01:00 April 2013 coming into Mumbai Airport
When i was ten the gateway to India was Bombay I definitely remember it being pointed out to me on that colonial globe I mentioned earlier, the one covered in pink, remember? I suppose its like when you buy a new house, you can change the name, just not the post code and India definitely belongs to the Indians, it always did.
Mo, one of my friends was always dead chuffed when we did India as a topic at school as he said his grandparents had been there, lived there even. I thought he was having me on as I knew they actually ran the corner shop where we could get sherbet fountains, the Beano and car parts. The Patel's were true 1st generation entrepreneurs, the sort politicians keep banging on about, if it sold, they stocked it and if they didn't they would tell you where you could get it. I always thought it strange they were open all year round including Christmas but would shut up shop around Bonfire night. Don't get me wrong I loved Bonfire night, even knew it had something to do with a bloke trying to blow up parliament, not sure why, maybe the noise from Big Ben was annoying him, its a bugger when you can't sleep and that's one hell of a bell to have banging out the time all night long. I love fireworks, but in my lapsed christian version of bonfire night there were no presents and you still had to go to school. Mo's mom and dad used to let him have the day off, hmmm was I missing a trick here. As you have probably assumed by now Mo was British Asian, many of my friends were. For years I thought the place was called the Black Country because so many of us were black, its not a racist comment its what i genuinely thought, I was definitely OK with that as the black kids in the gang were the cool ones. Also in the summer they went slightly darker where as I went bright red and my skin fell off in sheets. Time to face up to it, I was a ginger, there its taken me 51 years to admit it but i am a photosensitive, and this was the 70's, SPF was something written on the side of Captain Blue's car. When it was sunny (in most of my childhood it was always sunny, wasn't everyone's?) we actually basted ourselves in slightly scented cooking oil then at night we applied a florescent pink lacto-calamine lotion with a cotton wool ball. To this day i have no idea how the calamine got to be so cold. Red by day, pink at night or, if it had been really hot, purple. Being black was definitely cool, looking like a radiation victim wasn't
Cabin Lights Up, time to hand back the snuggy blankets.
I was born in West Bromwich in my grandmothers house, obviously i didn't know at the time, but 18 years later i'd be working in the hospital at the end of her road. Most people think of West Midlands as a sprawling metropolitan homogeneous mass but it isn't or wasn't then, its a lot of small villages that have just expanded to rub up against each other. Each with very distinct flavor, culture and dialect. Even today many spend their entire lives in the village of their birth, at the time I fully expected to do the same. Though born in West Brom most of my childhood and school years were in Dudley, we moved there via Langley when i was 6 or7(ish). My mom and dad still live in the same house, they bought it off-plan and have owned it from new, its a typical early '70s semi, three bedrooms, a fair sized garden, our home. For a while Lenny Henry's sister lived up the road from us and Sue Lawley lived down the dip in Lower Gornal. In time, long after we had left the three schools we went to merged, I've never met either of them, though i have slept on a desert island and in a Premier Inn, they must have been out on those days. I lived in Dudley at home until i was in my early 20s, with my dad, and long suffering mother and younger sister, I use the phrase long suffering as they both had to suffer dad and me. Nothing to see here... move along.
Background Info re: Lower Gornal, as every Black Country kid knew, is where they put the pig on the wall to see the band go by. Before you ask I have no information on whose pig, which wall, what band, what they were playing, why the pig or its owner were interested in said band or even what the band and pig were doing in Gornal in the first place. You know I said nothing in my childhood had any real impact on me going mental in later life... I'm reconsidering.
Seat Belt Light On, Seats back to the vertical. Landing Gear Down
Dudley Education Board could never make its mind up if it was for or against the 11+ exam, so they decided to take a year out to think about it just as I turned 11. The result was we all had to stay in our junior schools for another year. In the end we sat a version of 11+ aged 12, imaginatively called the 12+ Exam. I was accepted for the grammar school and remember opening the letter and ringing round to see who was going to be there with me.
So how did a non-academic, uncoordinated, scatter brained, dyslexic, middle working class kid who preferred watching the TV to studying get through.
I cheated.
In fact thanks to our headmaster we all cheated, we had nine moths of intensive training in "How to pass the 12+" That extra year between 11 and 12, while the education committee spent its time hand wringing, we practiced problem solving, pattern recognition, number sequencing, written comprehension, as many of the paper's sections as our headmaster thought he could cram into our heads without us exploding. It wasn't about league table performance, it was a group of teachers who wanted to give their kids the best chances in later life. True some of us fell on the way but that year more kids from our school made it to the grammar school than in just about any other year.
I am eternally grateful.
Even so, I lost touch with a lot of my childhood friends that summer, even those who lived quite close now moved in different circles and found new friends. They were moved on to have less opportunity by a process that pigeon holed them at 12, told them there weren't bright and had better look for a trade as university wasn't for them. All based on a two hour paper of psychometric psycho-bollocks, written by mostly middle class white male academics and based on flawed thinking.
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