Good Times

-


Whilst assembling my usual additions to a bog-standard Pizza Express American [Pepperoni] pizza tonight - anchovies, chilli flakes and extra oregano - I got caught up in reflection on times past, as this particular pizza topping combination harks back over forty years to my days working at Birmingham University; and reminds me of the possible life paths left behind in favour of the one I chose and where I find myself at this moment. As I've said before, I had a secure job and career path ahead of me at the University: I was looking at getting my own department and the the Senior Photographic Technician's post in Civil Engineering, and had also secured the teaching of a night class in photography, locally: all effectively by the hand of my boss, Arthur Burgess - lovely man - who oiled the wheels on both counts.

The lunchtime pizzas I ate in abundance in those days were as far from the real deal as are the Pizza Express excuses for the estimable Italian fare of legend are today. In fact, I'd go so far to suggest that I prefer the memory of the taste of those takeaways of 1980 to today's; though bastards are they both. At least the Selly Oak takeaway's fare of those days had the benefit of novelty about it. I was exposed to the absolutely real deal reality of Neapolitan pizza after we'd chosen our particular sliding door direction and moved to North Wales in 1980. In around 1982, an Italian guy opened a small pizza-oriented Italian place nearly opposite from where I was working at the time: 'La Bella Napoli'. With his newly imported pizza oven, he made some of the most gorgeous pizzas I've tasted to this day; and of course the best being his signature Margherita: no simpler and more profound food to be found, full stop.

Our sliding doors moment was decided by a percentage point in my degree result, rather than food, however: one mark more and I would have gone to The Royal College of Art in London; as it was, kismet and North Wales prevailed, and here we remain. Still, though, the best pizza I have ever eaten was that in Bangor forty years ago, not thus far to be repeated since either here, or in Italy or even London for that matter: but the fact that this simple bread-based dish has featured throughout my timeline is kind of weirdly symbolic to me, and a yardstick by which I judge bread-based foodstuffs to this day. The confluence of events and circumstances that led us to this place and our realisation of the rightness of our being here encompasses all of these apparently random and trivial things. It's panned out pretty good, as well, methinks... 

Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more