Lunch at Harriet's in Bury St Edmunds and In the Thick of It.

So here we are in Ealing after a splendid few days in Suffolk; the weather here is as miserable as ever but we can’t have everything.


On Sunday we had a break in the weather which enabled us to have some fun at the birthday party in my daughter’s garden; we had an old fashioned camp fire with hot dogs and roasted marsh mellows. My son in law had built something called a thing so he could keep the food hot. A thing? I have no idea what it might he called: three pieces of long sticks tied together at the top and then spread over the top of the camp fire so can hang a billy-can or a dutch-oven over the top of the camp fire so you could help yourself to the nosh.

He had put a few big onions into pot till they caramelised then maybe four million chipolata sausages on top of that. On the table was a pile of hot dog buns duly split so you could dump your hot dog and a fair splatter of onions onto one.

I think there were about ten children there at ages from five to seven except for my youngest grandson who is two; all went well with the eating till Harry, aged seven, said “what’s this stuff on my sausage?”

The fool there, the fool being me, said onions!! “Oh I don’t like onions!” he said and then another kid said the same thing – “I don’t like onions!” went around the tiny throng like a baton in a baby relay race and the next thing you know we were exchanging hot dogs 'with' for hot dogs 'without.' Little George ask for his hot dog to be without sausage or onions; just a bun and ketchup which I obliged cheerfully swallowing the little chipolata.

Then Monday we went to Harriet’s in Bury St Edmunds; Harriet’s is a café in the centre of the medieval town and is a part of old England; something Philip Larkin would probably write about in his very cynical talented way; he was the one with the famous lines ‘they fucked you up your mom and dad/cause they were fucked up too;’ the ex poet laurite of England was also famous for a better couplet about virginity saying virginity was lost somewhere ‘between Lady Chatterley and The Beatles first LP.’ That’s probably the virginity of England which was never the same after The Beatles first put their fingers up to the establishment. If you’re a Philip Larkin fan I’m sorry if I’ve paraphrased but I have no reference books to hand and, at the time of writing this, no access to the Internet.

Thinking about it though England has never been the same since the lifting of the ban on the DH Lawrence classic and the anarchic comedic influence of The Beatles; I know I was there as you’ll see in a previous post on this blog.

So there we were sitting in Harriet’s with the strains of Glenn Miller and The String of Pearls playing in the background and the waitresses wearing their black and white pinafore style uniforms sending many a shudder down the spines of all red blooded males especially the ones just out of school.

We sat at a round table which would be big enough for two people to have one cup of coffee and a scone and we struggled to eat four lunches in the tiny amount of room provided; but that is middle England so what do you expect?

Harriet’s is a lot bigger than the café in ‘Wythnail and I’ but I think you get the picture.

The last time I was in there four of us and two children sat at a table which was bigger and rectangular near the edge of the large room ; my wife ordered a tea cake and pot of tea and the rest ordered something similar but not the tea cake.

After a few minutes the manager, in his black suit, marched over and said “Who’s having the tea cake?”

My wife raised her hand; he strategically placed a very small paper napkin and a knife in the middle of the table with a look that said ‘This is for the person with the tea cake and it’s not to be touched by anybody else.”

We all looked at it to see if it was going to move and then we looked at each other and giggled. I can just imagine the staff being trained on their first day at Harriet’s in the way to serve the person who ordered the tea cake. Obviously on the day the tea cake specialist was not available and so it was left to the manager himself to be the specialist!

So as I head off back to America I think of the comings and goings of both countries; each one with a population thinking their country is the better of the two; one of the countries saying theirs is the best country in the world when most of the population haven’t been anywhere else and the other knowing theirs is not the best but not the worst either; but I know which of the two has the best television service. The BBC makes programmes as good as The Sopranos every week; whilst here I saw a BBC film drama with Lindsay Duncan playing Margaret Thatcher in a movie about her downfall, which was one in a series about English women and I saw a couple of episodes of a political satire series called 'The Thick of It' with Peter Capaldi; it will never be shown in America – the language is too rich; according to today's Guardian last week's episode clocked up just under a century of 'fucks' in the thirty minute show; it's full of great dialogue and the fucks add to the mix.