COINCIDENCE?

COINCIDENCE?


A few years ago the Independent Newspaper published a letter I sent that was in response to an article about Gastro-pubs. The letter is reproduced below:

Letters to the Editor,
The Independent,
E.14.

15th October 2003.

Your feature about Gastro-pubs sparked off a few memories. When `I took my first pub in 1962, I inherited a cook who’d worked there during the war. Kit her name was. If only there were more like her in pubs today.

We only served food lunchtimes, we had an upstairs restaurant but served the same food in the bar. Everything was delivered daily from local tradesmen, butcher, baker, fish,monger, greengrocer all from the sadly missed Angel Lane market in Stratford, E.15. There was no freezers or micro waves in those days. No specialised frozen food companies with their pre-packed ready portioned meals, even the fridge we had was a huge wooden affair that just about kept the food cool.

But Kit made the loveliest pies and puddings, her fish and chips made with skate and plaice fresh from the market was the best I’ve tasted, better even that Whitby’s finest and her scotch eggs made you realise why they were once considered delicacies instead of something to be avoided at all costs.

Although I realised that my beer sales were subsidising the food side I stuck it out for about three years before pulling the plug on the restaurant. Customers then didn’t want to pay for the food, it was so cheap in the shops that they objected to realistic prices. Lots of patrons never looked at the menu just the prices, our most popular seller, especially with the reporters from the Stratford Express opposite the pub, was Shepherds pie which at 8d (eight old pennies) was a bargain so. sadly, I closed and earned a fortune out of the disco that replaced it.

Then, as now, money is all that seemed to count.

It’s sad how we lose that which we most love for the sake of a few pounds.

I generally welcome the Gastro-pubs as pubs, in general, have become unpleasant with their emphasis on events to promote heavy drinking amongst women as well as men, the sooner there’s no pubs the better.

But the food these new bar sell does, at the moment, depend a bit on novelty with the emphasis on fashion rather than flavour and tasteability, it has to be Mediterranean, Pacific rim, Californian, New European or have one of these ‘buzz’ words attached to it, it will soon pall and God forbid that we ever gp back to ‘Pub Grub’ like Scampi in the basket or frozen whitebait, there will be a demand for more ‘old fashioned’ food which will filter down from top restaurants like St Johns of Smithfield and I think the traditional Sunday roast is still everyone's’ favourite.

By the way I used to go into the ‘Crown’ you referred to with my Dad in the fifties. It was ultra respectable then, on the edge of Victoria Park, quite middle class for the area - to use an Americanism ‘what goes around comes around’.

Sincerely,

Eddie Johnson.

The Independent I’m pleased to say published the letter in full. My sister, who still lives in Wanstead, East London, asked me to drop the newspaper in to her, which I did. After I left her house to drive back to Long Melford she had a delivery of Calor Gas, she was chatting to the delivery man about how the area had changed and he mentioned that he used to go into the ‘Two Puddings’ some years previous. He was a man in his forties, ‘as a matter of fact’ he went on to say ‘my Nan worked there during the war. right up till the mid sixties’. Doreen was astonished and so was he when she showed him the letter in the newspaper, Kit was his grandmother! To read about her from 40 years ago. Sadly his Nan, or Kit as I knew her had died some years previous but his Grandfather was still alive and was pleased to see the recognition of Kit as a great cook so many years later.

Remarkable what?

Eddie Johnson.

MEANING(LESS).

Watching birds in the garden you soon come to realise that all their frantic activity, all their comings and goings, to-ing and fro-ing all fits to a pattern. A pattern repeated year in and year out forever, its all nature. The trees have leaves that the caterpillars feed on, the birds catch the caterpillars to feed their young; if the leaves, because of warm weather, come out too early the caterpillars have a feast day because later in the season the leaves develop a protective sheen that makes them unpalatable to allow their blossom to develop so that the fruits, nuts or acorns grow so that the trees will eventually perpetuate themselves, but if the caterpillars cant feed properly they die and the birds don’t have them and their offspring doesn’t get fed and so it goes, watching these creatures and plants there comes the realisation that all is like clockwork preordained.

Humans are the same. We go to work to get money to buy food to feed our offspring, all our fevered activity from the tycoons and businessmen who are forever striving to make more and more money, why? Because like all of us they are programmed. Each and everyone one of us has to engage in activity that, however it seems, painting pictures, writing books, curing people, collecting rubbish, making millions is all part of nature’s programme.

We are all part of Mother Earth, no matter how intelligent or how stupid we are pre conditioned to do what we can.

Take football. Is this part of the system. Do birds or squirrels play? Some would argue that when all beings are young they play, I assume puppies and kittens are playing when they chase after a ball; or a piece of string. Is this to train them to cope with the exigencies of life. Surely football and cricket and boxing is only an extension of the training for living that primitive man did when he had to hunt for food and fight for his life.

If everything is so programmed and we know it why bother? Because if we don't bother we sink into a state known as depression which makes one ill and lack lustre and no fun to be with and eventually so apathetic that there is no point. But that is the reason one gets depressed because there is no point. But knowing there’s no point and knowing you will get depressed it is best to act as if there is a point and to go about daily life with a sense of immense purpose and therefore feel cheerful and good about oneself and make all around you happy.

And so it goes. The eternal question. There isn’t really a question and there is certainly no answer.

Eddie Johnson
Long Melford. 21.10.2007.I rarely read the colour supplement but as an admirer of Studs Terkel I had to read the Robert Chalmers interview which I enjoyed, however to refer to Paul Robeson as ‘the black opera singer’ is almost dismissive of one of the great Americans of the 20th century. Robeson certainly sang in opera, he also acted in many films but it was his singing of ‘negro spirituals’ that most people remember him for that and his singing of the ‘Showboat’ hit ‘Old man River” whose lyrics he gradually altered over the years so that they reflected the plight of the black man in American society.

Chalmers also writes of James T Farrell’s crime novels. Studs Lonigan was a story of a young Irish American’s upbringing and life in Chicago, it is considered to be a classic of the depression years, the article gives the impression that Lonigan was some private eye from the pen of pulp crime writer.. A bit more care and attention and maybe research please.

Yours faithfully,

Eddie Johnson
Long Melford. 21.10.2007.

A tender farewell to John Davies.

Funerals vary so much. Its odd really; grief one would suppose is a universal feeling. Of course it depends on the age, the circumstances, the closeness of the deceased. If they are very young or struck down in their prime, their parents and siblings, wives and children are overwhelmed with unutterable sadness and a feeling of such desolation and misery that one’s very limbs will not function properly. The grievers gait is slow and they are bent as if in very old age.

There are cultural differences too. The traditional Irish wake where the recently departed is stood upright in his coffin and all around him the mourners celebrate his life with song, dance and drink. West Indians also treat death less reverentially as a celebration of past life; deeply held religious beliefs where death is believed to be a bridge to another world helps mourners stay cheerful.

Forty two years ago I went to the first funeral of my life when I was thirty three years old. I haven’t stopped going to them since.

The early events I went to were sombre, sometimes heart breaking events where the chief mourners were dumb with misery and tears.

As I’ve got older many of my friends have died as have my Mum and Dad and all my Uncles and Aunts. When a friend dies if one hasn’t seem them for some time their is a feeling of detachment. After the usual expressions of regret to the family and children there is acquaintance and friendship to be renewed with fellow mourners who haven’t seen each other for years.

I went recently to the funeral of John Davies, one of my oldest and best friends. He wasn’t particularly old by the standards of today, he was seventy, but he’d been ill and bedridden for some months and though not in great pain he slept most of the day and seemed to gradually waste away and descend into everlasting sleep.

He was a popular man very well known in the East end and there was five or six hundred people at the crematorium to see him off. The reception was at a hotel where his family had seen to it that there was lots of good food and plenty to drink.

It all seemed so unreal to me. I was surrounded by friends and family and we were all laughing, joking, eating and drinking and telling each other what a wonderful send off it was and how John would have loved it; I guess he would have. Apart from tears from some grandchildren and a few muffled sobs in the chapel there seemed no evidence of overwhelming grief. I felt a loss within me. A sadness that I’d lost a great friend but is as if a stoic acceptance has come with age that its a natural and normal process as if only at the last stages of life this awareness becomes fact. All through young and middle age one regards death as unlikely so its not contemplated and is so shocking when it comes; but in the elderly it is embraced not eagerly but with equanimity and a sense of the inevitable.

I decided when I got home from the funeral that I wanted a small one. A muted affair for immediate family and close friends. My life has been a sad one in recent years and I don't want jokes and celebration round my grave..I would like some tears falling on the new turned earth.

The Independent Newspaper,
London.

17 Oct 2007.


Dear Sir,

Vince Cable is right about the ‘cult of youth’; it’s all around us reflected in our awful culture, dumbed down vulgar television. celebration of violence and morbid fascination with pathology on our tvs’; childrern being denied their childhood pitchforked into grown up fashion clothes, make up and adult violent video games before their time; binge drinking and raucous behaviour on the streets, lack of respect for anyone but theirselvess. Old people are shamelessly, unforgiveably treated in all walks of English society. Its sad because we have so much to offer, we don’t want to be in charge but we’d like a voice. If old voices had prevailed in 2003 I doubt if there’d been a war in Iraq.

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