Snapshot: Reunited in raincoats with ice cream cones
This photograph is one of my family favourites. I am on the left, with my older sister in the middle and my younger sister on the right. It was taken six years ago, and it always makes me smile.
My two sisters now live in Canada and my mum and I live in England, but we siblings were born and lived our early life in Northern Ireland and spent many happy family holidays in Newcastle, County Down.
On my mum’s 80th birthday six years ago, we had a family reunion in Northern Ireland. It was the first time the three of us sisters had returned at the same time since my younger sister’s wedding 25 years earlier. We spent one afternoon back in Newcastle and, even though it was wet and windy, we were determined to relive our childhood and have an ice-cream while walking along the promenade. My sisters were unprepared for the weather and had to borrow plastic raincoats from my auntie. As children, we would have been horrified to think that we might one day choose to wear such a thing.
So many memories of growing up, parting and coming together again are in this photo. I love my sisters and, even though we live miles apart, that special sisterly bond never fades.
And we are all still smiling.
Sandra Savage
Playlist: A thread that binds three generations
Norwegian Wood by the Beatles
“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me / She showed me her room / isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?”
Norwegian Wood has resonated through three generations of my family. But it’s the jazz instrumental, not the Fab Four version, that has come to have most meaning for me.
Growing up in the 1970s, little elicited louder groans from me than one of my dad’s Buddy Rich LPs finding its way on to the record deck. The fact that Rich was, arguably, the greatest jazz drummer of all time was of no significance. To my tender, pop-accustomed ears, those LPs were tedious, tune-free and a cue to seek sanctuary in my bedroom. The classic Lennon-McCartney song was just one of Rich’s set that I fully failed to appreciate. Although I didn’t know, it was also my dad’s favourite track.
At the decade’s end, a BBC season of Beatles’ films shown over Christmas sparked my interest in the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo that soon blossomed into an ardent passion. For months, I listened to little else, much of the time while my dad and I played snooker on a small portable table in our front room. A few years later, when I began to play the guitar, it was one of the first tunes I taught myself.
Shortly before my dad died in 2013, I learned that he had once seen Buddy Rich perform at Bridlington Spa. Inviting requests from the audience that night, the legendary drummer received one from my dad for Norwegian Wood – and obliged. Recounting the story, it was clearly a source of great joy for my dad. That he had actually called out – my dad was reticent at the best of times – was a measure of just how much he loved that particular track.
Choosing the music for his funeral service, Norwegian Wood seemed a fitting tribute. On the day, through my tears, I still managed the comforting thought that – ironic as it perhaps was – I was finally willing to oblige dad and let him have his song played without any complaint.
The author Sarah Dessen wrote that music is “something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common”. Norwegian Wood is a thread that binds not only my dad and me, but also my son. Returning recently from playing trombone with a local youth jazz orchestra in France, my son was full of enthusiasm for the new tunes he had performed. His favourite? Norwegian Wood.
Whenever I hear it now, it brings happy memories of those long nights playing snooker with my dad to the soundtrack of the Fab Four. It’s also a reminder that everyone – not just dads – has their individual passions, and that, even if they aren’t to our own taste, we should at least be tolerant of them.
Graham Denton
We love to eat: Spag bol with my best friend and brother
Ingredients
1 onion
2-3 cloves garlic
Olive oil for frying
500g or so minced beef
Approximately one glass of red wine
2-3 cans of tinned tomatoes
Mixed herbs
Time
Fry finely chopped onion and garlic in a little olive oil until soft, before adding minced beef and frying for a couple of minutes more. Add red wine, tinned tomatoes and herbs and cook for as long as you can, until the texture is smooth, soft and deliciously rich.
My friend, Sally, hit a culinary low when she served my brother Simon a tuna spaghetti bolognese. To this day, he still shudders at the memory, and such was his horror that I felt compelled to teach her to cook a more traditional spaghetti bolognese recipe.
One balmy summer’s afternoon – the magical sort when you have no particular deadlines, and nowhere else to be – we set about cooking up a memory. I taught her how to soften the onions and garlic without letting them catch and taint the flavour. Then we fried the minced beef, poured in generous amounts of red wine into the pan and, in the spirit of Keith Floyd, plenty into our own glasses, too. We added the tinned tomatoes – good ones mind you, it’s an ingredient I never stint on – and a final dash of water and a pinch of mixed herbs.
Then for the biggest lesson of all. We turned the heat down low and left the bolognese to cook, long and slow, and just waited for the liquid to “reduce, reduce, reduce!”
We whiled away a few precious hours, laughing and chatting, with just the odd stir, before tucking in to her first delicious (or even edible, if you ask Simon) home-made spag bol. More than 15 years later, I still gets texts from Sally with those three magic words, “Reduce, reduce, reduce”, and I know that somewhere in deepest, darkest Devon, there’s spaghetti bolognese for dinner that night.
Kate Comaish
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