...or what I did last weekend.
Sunday Tea. SD can take credit for this idea. Katie was coming over and we were talking about what we (he) could cook for her (he's ace - he comes to my house and cooks... if only he did the ironing and didn't make such a mess in the bathroom, he'd be the perfect boyfriend) when he suggested a Sunday Tea. You know, like you had... on a Sunday... at "Tea Time", which in our house was around 5 to half past generally.
Tea Time in Moat Way - the street I was born on (well, the street that had the house I was born in on) - was very much part of the Sunday Routine which started, for me, with going off to Sunday School with Andrew Salisbury (who lived round the corner and who was partially sighted and my best friend for a time). I only went because he did and we got a Opal Fruit for going. I quite liked the songs too. And sometimes you got a free book. Anyway, Sunday School... and then back for Sunday Dinner. A roast of course. Usually chicken. Sometimes beef. Maybe lamb. Vegetables cooked to buggery and a bottle of pop from the offie on the corner - we were allowed one a week. TV in the afternoon. A reluctant bit of homework (or rather a bit of homework done reluctantly, though I like the idea of reluctant homework - equations that won't co-operate). Heart to Heart, Charlies Angels, Nightrider. The top 40 on Radio One. Sunday Tea. Bath night. That's Life. Bed - with a sigh - school tomorrow.
And Sunday Tea... Limp lettuce, boiled potatoes (left over from dinner), sliced ham, corned beef (was there ever a more sickening invention in the history of food? I know - let's take all the shit from the abattoir floor and squeeze it together and sell it to poor people in a square can with a weird key thing that always snaps when you try to use it), pickled beetroot in a jar ("made your dinner look like a road accident," said SD), a block of Cheddar, tinned tuna, salad tomatoes... and in our house (but apparently no one else's anywhere ever) cold beans out of the can.
I'm not sure if this was just a Malvern thing or a family habit or what. But we did. We had cold beans out of can. Everyone I've ever spoken to about this, says that that was weird. And then of course there was "afters": in our house, maybe a trifle, that collapsed as soon as it was spooned out into the bowl into a semi-liquid clown-coloured sludge.
SD's spread for Katie was only inspired by this of course - not for us cold beans and tuna fish, it was home made quiche and an Italian mixed salad. But the idea was the same. And, since we had a guest, we had a choice of sweet too. What a host!
Shame I repaid him for this by dragging him to Halifax on Tuesday, with the intention of going to a gallery I'd heard about called Dean Clough. We had had a plan to go to Liverpool , but it seemed so far away that Tuesday morning, a whole 2 hour train journey away, that I made the case for going to Halifax instead.
Dean Clough was supposed to be an impressive old mill that had been transformed into 3 floors of art exhibit space. It turned out to be an office block, in a mill, that had some pictures (admittedly, quite nice pictures some of them, on the walls). I've never been in such a weird place.
The ground floor of the gallery is OK - there's one of those shops that makes a half hearted attempt at selling art related things run by a woman in specs who has a face like she couldn't care less if nothing was brought in there all day. There was a proper gallery area - Curators Choice - which had some interesting pieces on display. But where was the rest? There were no signs, no maps... I went back to reception and asked the receptionist, who was too busy reading OK magazine and chatting to her colleague about her weekend to really give much of a toss about any visitors, for a plan and was told there wasn't one. Then I was directed up stairs and down corridors to the other so-called exhibit areas.
I dragged a weary SD round - he was having one of his "bad days" and could only find amusement for himself by making sure that I had a bad day too - down wood-chipped office corridors where women in clippy heals marched back and forth with clip boards and fat blokes in suits sweated at computers, glancing up as we passed. It was truly bizarre. There were some fantastic paintings there, but, because they had been so casually placed on these unkempt walls, they took on a mere commercial feel - just decorative pictures for the passing office workers to ignore at leisure.
If this place is getting grant funding - which I bet it is - it should be shut down immediately. The way that the people in the offices regarded us as we pottered round, scowling faces, slight surprise, it was obvious that all but the first gallery were not actually meant to be seen by the public at all, but were there purely for the hell of it and so that the building and the idiots that own it can claim more money from the Arts Council.
So - don't go to Dean Clough gallery in Halifax. Ever. It's rubbish.
Though not quite as rubbish as the gallery at the Piece Hall in Halifax, where we went to next, which consisted of 250 pictures of Halifax, painted and photographed over a period of around 100 years, many of the same street. By this time SD was in a dark place... "oh look, another picture of Halifax... I haven't seen enough of those... oh good... another one..."
We should have gone to Liverpool.