1980s REVISITED:This week Side Order has been prevailed upon to wax lyrical on the topic "Food Memories of the 1980s". This is a pretty tall order for him, as he was only a small boy at the time. The whole decade was a blur of penny sweets and Subbuteo.
I grew up in Ballyhaunis. I didn't eat in a restaurant until I was 15. My mother used to buy a chicken every week. She roasted it on a Sunday and the poor animal might have assumed that was the end of its ordeal. Not by a long shot, it wasn't. My mother wasn't finished with that bird until the following Thursday. And even then I'd have advised that carcass to stay out of her way.
As a child, I was constantly baffled at how the kids on our favourite TV programme, Home & Away, had the time to be sinking milkshakes in the diner before school. Mornings in our house consisted of my mother roaring at us to get out of bed. Sometimes, she'd throw in headlines from Morning Ireland, just to spice things up. ("Up, up, the lot of ye . . . The Tories have been re-elected . . . Up, up, up.") No matter how well rehearsed the drill - brushing, dressing, eating - we rarely made it through the school gates with time to spare. What time did Australian school kids get up at, we wondered - 4am?
The culinary highlight of my year came in August. Assuming Mayo made it to that year's All-Ireland semi-finals, my father would bring us all on the train to Dublin for the day. First stop was McDonald's on O'Connell Street. Everything about the place was magical, in my mind. Even the cheap plastic toys were something to be treasured. After that, my father would bring us somewhere he wanted to go. It's fair to say we were not your conventional GAA supporters. I remember once having my Mayo flag confiscated by a security guard at the Hugh Lane Gallery. I bet that didn't happen too often there.
Outside of that, it was slim pickings. My mother had four small children and she ran a tight ship. She did her shopping on a Thursday, and we each got a packet of Tayto crisps as a treat. That was it for the week. But I had three elderly aunts who came into town for their pensions on a Friday. And while they were in town, they often stayed on for a drink or two. I quickly learned that if I walked home slowly enough from school on pension day, a 10p coin might well be mine. My grandfather, too, until his death in 1987, was always good for a pound note on a Sunday. I'd spend the lot straight away. Wham bars, Skittles, Mr Freeze's - I never knew when to stop. My sister Una, on the other hand, was a hoarder. She'd wait until I'd devoured everything, and we were in the back of the car on the way home. Then she'd slip a pack of Opel Fruits out of her pocket and slowly savour each one. It was a perfectly calculated act of sadism that I still hold against her.
