Ian Sansom - Ring Road - There’s no place like home

And now Bob’s mother Maureen has Alzheimer’s. Bob can’t believe it. Sometimes he’ll shout and rage at her, when no one else is there: he can’t believe she’s really ill. A part of him thinks she’s putting it on. Silly woman, he calls her. Silly bitch. Stupid cow. Challenging her. Words he remembers saying to her only once before, when he was a child, after they’d had some argument or other and his mother had said to him, ‘You’re not too old for me to give you a good hiding, you know,’ and he smirked at her and so she did, she smacked him, right across the backside, and he felt the full force of her wedding ring and he never said the words again. Until now. When Maureen deteriorated one of the nurses recommended a book to Bob, to help him cope, but Bob doesn’t read books. He does not admire book learning: what Bob admires is expertise. So he buys in twenty-four-hour care. It’s the least he can do.

At night when he gets home from work, he lets the nurse take a few hours to herself, and he sits down with his mother in front of the wide-screen TV, in his TV room. He’s had the place fitted out with a DVD player and a complete home cinema system – which he’d had to order specially from America. He’d gone to considerable trouble, had got in Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man to help him fix the screen to the joists in the ceiling – but he didn’t enjoy watching the home cinema with his mother. It didn’t feel natural. He only watched it now with the waitresses. With his mum he preferred to watch TV, like they used to when Bob was a child. They watch anything, Bob and his mum. Films. Football. News. Documentaries. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It’s not the content. It’s the act of watching that counts. It is a huge comfort to them both.

Before they go to bed at night, during the adverts, Bob always makes them something to eat. He tends to get hungry around about ten, the same every night, before the news, but it always seems to surprise him, his own hunger. He never seems prepared for it. Sometimes he roams around the kitchen in the semi-darkness, opening cupboards, ransacking for food. Bob is a rich man, but he can find no food in his own house which he would want to eat. What he could really manage would be one of his mum’s roast dinners. He could eat a tray of those roast potatoes. A whole tray. They were always so good. The beef dripping – that was the secret. He knows how to do it, of course – you have to get the beef dripping nice and hot in â saucepan, and then you bash the parboiled potatoes around in there for a bit, and season them with salt and pepper, and then slide them on the tray into the oven, and one hour later, perfect roast potatoes. But he could never be bothered to do it himself. It just wouldn’t be the same.

The rare roast beef, though. He could definitely eat some of his mum’s rare roast beef. And maybe some carrots. And a nice gravy. *

He goes from cupboard to cupboard – chocolates, biscuits, crisps, nuts, crackers. None of it is any good. It’s all manufactured. It’s all rubbish. He knows it’s rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish in his cupboards makes him so angry that he throws it all away, just chucks it in the bin. And then he buys more. He buys more rubbish. This is what happens when you’re a rich man in our town. You don’t necessarily buy better. You just buy more. Because there isn’t anything else to buy. You want something more fancy, you have to leave: you have to go to London, or somewhere else where they do funny spaghetti and truffle oils, and novelty cheeses.

Bob’s mother used to make lasagne. And she used to make a salmon soufflé, on special occasions, using a whole tin of salmon – that was good too. And sausage rolls. Macaroni cheese. Pies and pastries. And cakes. The smell of baking. The smell of fresh bread. The food then seemed so different. It was all so good. Bob’s favourite meal, of all the meals his mother used to make … after all these years, he still has no doubt what was his favourite, and every night, between the adverts, he ends up trying to re-create it.

When he used to come home from school he would be just so tired sometimes, and he’d be so hungry, before his dad got home from the works, and so he and his mum would sit down together, his mum drinking her coffee with two sugars and smoking, and him eating the sandwich that she’d made him: white bread and margarine and Cheddar cheese, or sometimes a slice of ham, if they had it in the house, which was not often.

‘How was school?’ she’d ask.

‘Fine,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘OK,’ she’d say and that would be fine. They didn’t have to talk: they were mother and son.

They would just sit there, the two of them, looking out of the window, eating cheese sandwiches and waiting for his dad to come home.

So when Frank Gilbey rolled up at Bob’s late one night, just before Christmas, Bob ushered him in, asked him to sit down in the big kitchen equipped with every piece of gadgetry imaginable, and about half a mile of granite work surface and a foundry’s worth of stainless steel, put the kettle on and put a simple cheese sandwich down in front of him.

‘So?’ said Bob.

‘There’s a problem,’ said Frank.

*He also has his own website now, and a cookbook, Speedy Bap!, which includes chapters on ‘Home-Made Burgers that Don’t Fall Apart’, ‘What Next with Tuna?’ and an appendix, ‘Mayo or Pickle?’, in which Bob comes down firmly on the side of chutney. The book is available locally from all good bookshops, or newsagents, price £9.99. It’s been a runaway success county-wide. Bob is in demand all over the place for signings and sandwich-making demonstrations. A new updated edition of the book, Speedy Bap!!, which is guaranteed a lot of local press coverage and includes all-new chapters on low-fat cottage cheese and wafer-thin ham, is due out soon, with additional recipes gathered from Bob’s visits to various Women’s Institutes, Soroptomists, the Waterstones up in the city, and other local groups and associations.

*Bob’s old friend Terry Wilkinson, ‘Wilkie the Gut’ to many of us here in town – a man who has enjoyed perhaps a touch too much old-fashioned food (cooked the traditional way) in his time – runs a nice little business, The Gist, up on the industrial estate, specialising in vehicle graphics, and he took care of all the graphics on the vans for Bob. Terry left school with no qualifications and few prospects but he now lives in a five-bedroom house with Jacuzzi in the Woodsides development, and frankly a few slips in spelling and the odd wandering apostrophe are hardly going to worry him: as far as Terry is concerned a palette is a palet is a palate; just as long as you get – as Terry himself might say – the gist.

*Unlike a lot of people here in town. Martin Phillips, the solicitor on Sunnyside Terrace, has dealt with more than his fair share of vibration white finger, and asbestos exposure, and occupational asthma, and allergic rhinitis over the past few years – dealing with wheezy old and middle-aged men who spent their lives working on the roads, or on the sites, or on the railways, or out in the fields, or in the factories and the steelworks up in the city, which covers just about everyone here, actually, and all of whom are now seeking recompense for lives diminished and cut short, recompense which usually covers about two weeks in Florida with the grandchildren, a new sunlounger for the patio and a slightly better coffin. For further details and information on claiming for industrial diseases contact your local Citizens Advice Bureau or ring Industrial Diseases Compensation Ltd on 0800 454532.

*Bob’s ‘Sunday Roastie Wedgie’ – cold roast beef, horseradish, English mustard and roasted vegetables in a granary bap – includes just about everything but the gravy (see Speedy Bap!, p.44). He did try experimenting with a cold gravy mayonnaise at one time but the combination of beef stock and whisked eggs was too cloying on the palate. It’s a simple lesson, but one worth repeating: gravy is best served hot.