Of puddings and floods, the rest was forgot

When I couldn’t find the recipe in the book wherein I knew that it should lie, I called my father. He had been what F9 calls “most rude, how offensive” when I had spoken to him earlier. I had rattled off the contents of my morning (collect boy from party, take boy to ju-jitsu grading, take boys to Sports Relief Mile, cancelled, go home, get camera, photograph flooded field) and he had cut across me part way between “queued in the rain” and “waited an hour” to say “Christ, your life’s dull.”

So I felt that I could dispense with pleasantries, and just launch in about the sponge pudding and which book had it been in.
Which I did.
“What are you talking about?” he sighed irritably.

This was a shock, for the making of the pudding had been a seminal episode in my life. Of a sudden, my father had announced that he would do a meal a week and that I would help him. It would be called bonding these days.
(I think E said this once, too, not the bonding, God forbid, the cooking. Though whether four chicken pies over six years, with me in charge of pastry, quite counts, I’m not too sure. I’m kind enough to leave it open to debate.)

A man pudding it was, full of the use of superfluous bowls, gusts of flour, the scrape of the spoon against a non-stick pan, and endless washing up. But delicious, too. We had crowed in triumph and chomped cheerfully. It had been followed, the next weekend, by a less successful tomato soup involving a burnt wrist, temper and swearing, and then he gave up all pretence of interest in cooking, all boiled and chopped out, and deep in loathing for both syrup pudding and tomato soup. A familiar feeling to she who stirs the pot night after night.

“Don’t you remember?” I said, astounded and teetering near devastated disappointment that it featured not even as a blip on the radar of his past.
“I think we know all about your place in the reliable memory stakes,” E muttered in passing, a low blow referencing the dull creature I had found myself to be in the diaries, and not the interruption I needed. I turned my back on him.
“It took all afternoon,” I pleaded.

I have become good at sensing exasperation down the end of a phone.
“When was all this?” he asked, for politeness’ sake, while clearly doing something else like reaching for a knife to sever the connection.
“Oh, I was about 14,” I said.
“Christ, Mill, I don’t know. I’ll get Lizzie to call you.”

My mother phoned back later, she had been out walking the dog, and was fuming at the vandalism of massive redwoods sawn down in Ashton Court to Improve Accessibility for disabled people to the Amenity that had been, but by now, thanks to the Improvement, was no longer, Ashton Court. She was all but crying at the raping of the land and the brutal destruction of ancient trees in pursuit of a fine notion which didn’t need pursuing because wheelchairs on wonky hills are never going to be much of a goer. They’ve done a similar thing round here, tightened the laws to the point that the hall in question, unable to afford the required changes has had to be put up for sale. So no one can use it. The disabled group are furious because they never wanted to go upstairs anyway, “And if we do, someone will carry us,” one old chap said more than reasonably.

She remembered the sponge pudding.
I had remembered it by then, it had been a jam pudding we’d converted to syrup which was why it didn’t feature under “syrup” in the index, and I’d lost interest in it, so we talked about trees and I told her about the planned building down the road of 400 new houses.

Much of round here is in line for so much of the same, and you wonder at the shortness of memory, even worse than my father’s for a delicious pud, for this is an area which was overwhelmed by flooding just 9 months ago. In our village, and the village to which we will be horribly closer, we are all in mourning for the imminent loss of the status quo. Somehow, the developers have bypassed the normal planning niceties which cripple the rest of us wishing to extend our houses because we can’t afford to move, and skipped straight to and past appeal.
There is no hope.
The lying swine at the environmental agency claims that the field in question floods once in a thousand years. It was puddled deep in water at the weekend, as it is every time it rains, so I took some photos and now need to work out how to get them from camera to computer to whirring out on a piece of paper and thence to Hazel Blears, she of the harsh haircut, and to whom we have all been instructed to post our objectives. A sure case of the overflowing waste bin for Ms Blears and a weasely non-response thanking us for our interest from some hunched factotum.

No wonder all there is to be sure of is driving boys around. I can no longer seek refuge in meaningful moments from my past, not now that I've found that this is not shared, not as I'd hoped. Don't look back, and don't look out the window. Neither is there as you remember it.