Liverpool Stories
The stories on this site are not included in my book.
The tales are snapshots of my life in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, and the echo chamber of the Mersey Sound that in the sixties resonated around the planet like an acoustic Tsunami. The stories cover a period of 50 odd years and so they touch on every aspect of my life from the rites of passage to the passing of youth. I hope you enjoy them.
Feed you head - Living off the fat of the land
By
John Williams
When I was young the only person I knew that was on a diet was my grandfather, who had ulcers, and so my grandmother would ensure that he had white fish at least once a week. That weekly treat was it basically, as the idea of him having steamed chicken, freshly made egg custards and all the other ludicrously expensive items on the NHS dietary handout was quite beyond my Gran's means.
So, on Thursdays, grandad would have a piece of Cod, he always stipulated a middle-cut steak, or a tail of Hake. Sometimes, and I can only imagine that it was part of a sea food theme, he would have Quewins, or more correctly, winkles. I had grown to love them and used to hover at his elbow where, like a voracious gull chick, I would await the moment when he would grudgingly afford me a pin skewered sea snail.
For most of my life I have been slim to the point of being emaciated. I was a true seventies success story in that I was borderline ugly and skinny with it. As my first wife once explained to me, there is a clear distinction between good looking and handsome. Good looking bordered on the pretty, while handsome was a broad category that included any man with two eyes, a mouth and a functioning nose. I was deemed handsome.
In the past five years I have gained almost twenty pounds in weight, and have had to undergo regular assaults on my persona by my two teenaged whip slim whipper-snappers. Whenever I buy a pair of casual trousers, the type that just slip on comfortably without recourse to endless buttons, they make cutting remarks about what they term 'fat man's trousers'. In truth I buy them for comfort but they won't listen.
I have gone from being a light middle weight at 153 pounds to a hulking light heavy at 173 pounds. After my stroke I decided that I had to get back on the Essex trail, David Essex I mean, that slender icon of the seventies.
Thus it was that yesterday morning, June the sixth 2003, I began my own D-Day assault on my adipose tissue. I went to a local book shop and bought a copy of the Atkins Diet. There were hundreds of them spilling from a cardboard box that had just been delivered and I couldn't help but think that the late Dr Atkin's wallet must have been the only fat thing in his life.
After a quick perusal of the induction part of the diet I paid a visit to my local supermarket and gleefully purchased twelve Richmond thin sausages, a packet of smoked bacon, a tin of plum tomatoes, a miniature black pudding and six eggs. What a fabulous diet I thought, designed by dockers for long distance lorry drivers.
Within half an hour I had eaten most of my provisions, because, as the diet states, you can eat as much bacon and eggs as you can stuff into yourself. I had only vaguely missed the treat I usually make from that repository of over refined white flour, a Warburton toastie. I could have had the butter though, if I'd only had something to put it on that is. You see all forms of carbohydrate are taboo in the Atkins diet. You can fry your eggs in butter it seems but you can't have it on toast!
When my wife, who is also gaining a little weight, came home from work I was full of prozeleytising zeal and so when she read that she could eat all the saturated fatty crap under the sun and still lose weight she opted to do the diet with me.
For supper she had a mushroom omelette, made with two eggs, while I settled for a plateful of prawns, a much loved food source that I had been frightened off by tales of cholesterol.
We were thrilled...we could eat all these things and still lose weight. Of course, my wife somewhat plaintively remarked that not being able to have a cup of tea was a worthwhile sacrifice if she was to regain her twigginess. I was already looking at the Argos catalogue to see if they had any Speedo swimming trunks because I was fed up of having to wear my Desert Rat style shorts.
By nine o'clock I was hungry so I settled for, wait for it, a bacon ommelette which was laid atop the small jungle of lettuce, tomato and cucumber which itself was smothered in permitted olive oil and vinegar dressing. So much for my cholesterol busting Simvastatin pills, which are the most expensive prescribed drug in Britain. I was an Atkins warrior and proud of it.
About an hour after my cholesterol fest my eye was caught by a packet of Penguin chocolate biscuits lying on the coffee table. Now chocolate is most definitely taboo as far Atkins is concerned, as is the white flour biscuit.
I smugly turned away from the siren Penguins and thought instead about my nightly scotch which my GP recommended. No go. Alcohol is banned. So is coffee. I drank the last of my Evian water and started to mentally climb the carbohydrate free walls.
Then I began to wonder why I was doing all this. I mean, where was I going to go after I had regained my Slim Jim silhouette? The pub, with all its temptations ranging from crisps, beer and mid match sandwiches, which in my local are made from Mighty Joe White bread, was a no go area.
Then I read that there was often a problem of halitosis attached to the Atkins diet, so that ruled out all forms of dancing, unless you were on the outside wing of a line dance.
By nine forty five the self satisfied looking Penguins were definitely skating on thin ice. It had also occurred to me, in my desperate desire to free myself from a diet which promised the earth but in terms of common or garden pleasure offered sod all, that while it was great to be told that I could eat as much chicken, steak and salmon as I liked it would be so bloody expensive!
I mean, a decent steak a day would cost a fortune as it is, but the well heeled Doctor Atkins recommends, nay demands, that we buy organic produce. Well, I can't see this diet taking off in those more deprived areas of Liverpool can you?
I mean, just imagine a scene where a young woman has just cashed her welfare cheque and is running hell for leather to the corner shop to buy some organic Aberdeen Angus beefsteak before it is all sold out, forcing her once again to feed her children organic chicken or wild Atlantic salmon followed by raspberries and whipped cream. The shame of it. Her gourmet kids would give her hell! Actually, fruit is largely absent from the Atkins diet as it's a source of the dreaded carbohydrates!
So it was that all of my good intentions suddenly culminated in the abrupt massacre of three innocent penguins, whose demise I heartily celebrated with a large scotch and lemonade. It should have been coke, but in those few hours when I had been a staunch advocate of Atkins, and as such temporarily immune to the lure of Mon Dieu du Sucre, I allowed my youngest boy to finish off the bloody bottle! The penguins were followed by a large slab of roasted almond milk choclate.
I staggered to bed shrugging off my guilt at my failure to guarantee that I would spend the rest of my life eating saturated fat while forever rejecting sweet things.
As I drifted of to sleep I heard a voice from the past...my mother's...telling me of the war time rationing which had apparently resulted in healthier people...and I thought yes, sugar was rationed then....I am going to ration my intake of sugar, but I'm damned if I am going to abandon it altogether. I mean, if God had wanted us to ignore sweet things he would not have invented girls!
The Tommy Atkins Diet
Tommy Atkins was the nickname given to British troops and so I have devised a diet which celebrates their fitness, from the deserts of Africa to the jungles of Burma. Let's face it folks, an obese fighting man is not only a liability, but a contradiction in terms, unless you are Sumo. But who would want a tush like that!
Breakfast
Corned Beef
Cabbage
(as much as you like, unless you are expecting visitors)
Mango Zest, (especially for those who served in Burma)
or
grated Prickly pear (for those who served in Africa)
Beverage of choice
Lunch
Baked Beans
Baked Sweet Potato (especially for ex Indian army types)
Jam Tart (Brioche et Preserve du Bint)
Beverage of choice
Supper
Battered fish
Chipped potatoes
Peas (the visitors proviso still applies)
Bread and butter pudding
Beverage of choice
Atkins allows the occasional indulgence in crispbreads, presumably as a change from chewing cardboard.
What happened to an apple a day keeps the doctor away?
Didn't Jesus claim to be the bread of life...was he saying he was poison?
About 8 months after writing this I was diagnosed as having diabetes type II. I don't have have to worry about sugar now as it's all taboo!