Cooking with Spinach....again!!

Some people have what are known as Salad Days, a time of youthful exuberance, naiveté and inexperience. For just under 18 months, I had what are now known as ‘The Spinach Years’, a time of squirrels, plastic flowers and shouty post-menopausal women on a dreadful TV magazine show (with a couple of gay men lobbed in for ‘balance’) slagging off other post-menopausal women because their bosoms had been so pneumatically enhanced they could take your eye out if they turned too quickly to look at you. My salad days were well and truly behind me by this time. My lettuce had become lifeless, my tomatoes were no longer red and plump and the least said about my cucumber, the better.

For those of you who have no idea what I am wittering on about, buy yourselves a pack of fondant fancies, pour a large tonic wine and pop along to http://iamspinach2011.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/my-very-first-blogor-how-me-and-jose.html It will explain why I Am Spinach and give you a potted history of the life and very peculiar times of an Englishman who once lived in Galicia...and survived. I won’t say unscathed as that would be manipulating the truth just a little too much; I still can’t do the hokey-cokey without getting flashbacks. But I am here!

So why am I resurrecting the Spinach dream after all this time I hear you both ask? Of course I no longer live in Spain, having swapped the sweeping, majestic, rugged Atlantic coastline for the denture-wearing delights of Channel-facing Bexhill; a town so full of elderly people that when we both moved here, we brought the average age of its citizens down to 73. 

I remembered Bexhill from when I’d previously lived in the area, just up the road in St. Leonards-on-Sea. I rarely came to Bexhill as there was nothing there to see, although I have to say that things have changed since we went away. There’s a tapas bar that serves mainly burgers and steaks, the post office is nearly all self-service which confuses the life out of the residents here and the explosion of funeral directors in the town means that the hearse is now the preferred mode of transport for most people. To be honest with you, the self-service post office is hilarious on pension day and far better than the local theatre. 

We do have a theatre here, the rather beautiful art deco De La Warr Pavilion on the seafront and to be fair it does have a few good turns on. We recently saw Jason Manford there (“I laughed until my truss disintegrated” – Bexhill Herald) as well as comedians Alan Carr, Alan Davies and Count Arthur Strong. Of course this is Bexhill, so amongst all this ribaldry are turns from The Dulcie Bickerstaffe Quintet and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa doing her best to breathe life into George Formby’s back catalogue, but you have to take what you can in life. And she did play a mean ukulele!

The De La Warr is also an exhibition space and we did go once. There was a show with covers from all of those Ladybird books we used to read as children, which was great fun. “Peter and Jane play make believe”, “Peter and Jane try heavy petting”, “Peter and Jane have an argument about why he never checks after flushing”. Along with these, we do have to put up with some very strange ideas for exhibitions, including (at the moment), a wood scaffold that looks like a pier. Inside! To commemorate this, the artist has created a limited edition wooden light bulb. Really? In a town full of people who are bordering dementia?

And just as New York evokes memories of taxi horns blaring and the smell of freshly cooked sidewalk food, Bexhill has a sound all of its very own; the distinctive click of metal on pavement. You may think I’m exaggerating this dear reader, but I can assure you that this is no stereotyping. Bexhill is the Patient Zero of stereotypes from which all other stereotypes are moulded. When zig-zagging up the street, taking one’s life in one’s hand by weaving in and out of walking frames, sticks and electric buggies, one is reminded of the sci-fi films of the seventies. They thought that in the brave new world of the new millennium, half of the population would be made of some form of metallic object. Well, in Bexhill, that’s true. A sizeable majority of the population that don’t have replacement joints use some other form of metallic object to remain upright as best they can, mainly whilst attempting to use the self service in the post office to get their pension out or trying to pay for a cup of tea with old thru’penny bits and moaning about this new-fangled coinage. The local scrap metal dealers here have dodgy under-the-counter deals with the local undertakers! At a concert I went to some years back where The Three Degrees were headlining, they summoned the audience to get on their feet in order find their groove. In the ensuing five minutes of chaos, both I and the talented ladies on stage thought that the audience had burst into spontaneous applause, until it became evident that the noise was 700 pairs of arthritic knees clicking into place simultaneously. 

It was into this cacophony of metallica and confusion that the lovely José and I made a fateful decision just over two years ago. His parents, being too selfish to have any more children to spread the burden, were getting older. With age comes infirmity, an ottoman full of cellular blankets and an inability to bite into an apple without a cupboard-full of denture fixative on standby. As an only child who loves living in this country, no matter how much Theresa May tries to destroy it, he asked if I would mind his parents coming to live with us. As the dutiful husband I am I threw a tantrum, whinged about it for days on end, attempted to blackmail him by telling his friends that he used to play the tambourine in a Salvation Army band, but I knew when I was beat. I said yes. And so began the long day’s journey into night whilst its teeth soaked in Steradent in the bathroom. On August 17^th 2016, his parents flew with us from Spain for the last time and landed in Gatwick, ready to make their new life in Bexhill. With us! My Spinach days were no longer behind me...............