Barley Sugar Time
(apologies for the shoebox-in-middle-of-road tone of this piece)
In my family of eight/nine (#9 being a later edition) there were certain annual rituals. Although there were many of us, and we lived in a rented house, and our clothes were home made and we bought one pair of good school shoes per year, we always had a week’s family holiday somewhere in the UK. We went to Skeggie, or Great Yarmouth, or St. Osyth, Hayling Island, or Scarborough, and somehow we all fitted in my dad’s Morris Traveller or Singer Vogue estate, which you always expected would break down at least once.
Part of the annual holiday ritual was a half pound or so of barley sugars, our travelling sweets, which (because I always got travel sickness really bad) I was led to believe had some kind of anti-travel sickness properties.
Haven’t had barley sugars for years, but I can almost taste them.
At the other end of there year, there was another ritual. The only time that Coca Cola ever darkened our doors was at Festivus, when my dad would buy a tray of tins. How many were on it? I don’t remember: was it 12 or 24? Somewhere in between? Anyway, that was it in terms of Special Occasion Coke, and, boy, was it ever exciting to have a Coke at Festivus. Of course, in those days it tasted completely different,
I thought of all this because I was reading David Mitchell this morning on the topic of cheap flights, and the idea that one day we might return to “1974 levels” of air travel. Personally, I wouldn’t mind, but then I’m one of those strange people who find the cheap flight experience repulsive. I know it’s supposed to be like taking a bus, but it’s just not. You see some of the dirty, smelly, decrepit buses around our streets and you wouldn’t want to think a plane would be maintained in such a poor state. If a bus breaks down, it’s an inconvenience. It’s slightly more of a problem if the same thing happens to an aeroplane. I’ve flown Easyjet a few times, and I grew increasingly nervous about flying the more I was exposed to it.
The eurotunnel trains are in a pretty shitty state by now – this is a company that’s been running at a loss since the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994 and I don’t think they’ve cleaned the toilets since then – and I would hate to be on the train when it broke down, but it still feels less scary than getting on a plane where margins are so tight that they charge you extra for having luggage or using the toilet.
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For long trips we often have an emergency round tin of some kind of orange coloured sweet tucked somewhere in the car. They are covered in some kind of white powder.