The Gran Tour Read online

  At Corley services, two familiar faces join us. It’s Dennis and Clem, who I met in Scarborough. It was Dennis who told me not to bother paying for a sea view. I give it ten minutes then go and say hello.

  ‘Clem thought it was you,’ says Dennis. ‘Didn’t you, love? You thought it was Ben. I said don’t be daft, he wouldn’t do it twice. Who’s that with you?’

  ‘That’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘Well you’re punching above your weight, let me tell you.’

  ‘It’s my nan.’

  ‘Is that right? You know, the only other person we’ve seen twice on a Shearings is Mrs Greggs. To be fair, you couldn’t miss her. We called her Mrs Greggs because the coach hadn’t finished parking before she was in Greggs buying a couple of pies and a Chelsea bun. Anyway, you’d better sit down before your nan thinks you’re organising a foursome.’

  17.00. Flintshire, north-east Wales. We’re on the A55, which connects Chester in the east to Holyhead in the west. Our driver, Tim, says the road was funded by the EU, and wonders whether we should tell it to pack its bags and sling its hook. And then, as we approach the town of Llandudno, and people start to shuffle happily at the prospect of arrival and dinner and maybe a glass of wine, Tim says that it should be borne in mind that free bus travel doesn’t apply in Wales. This announcement is met with boos and tuts, and the odd four-letter word. Had Tim announced that all grandchildren were to be sacrificed by a group of Welsh druids next weekend, it’s hard to imagine this lot being any more distraught.

  The County Hotel is on the seafront. When we pull up outside, a hotel employee called Eva gets on. She sounds at once Polish and Scouse. She promises to keep it short and sweet and then goes on at some length about what’s for dinner (laverbread and cockles), what’s planned for this evening (bingo and singing), and what time our medication will be administered. I find this last joke offensive, but nobody else seems to – it goes down very well in fact. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: these old numpties don’t know when they’re being victimised.

  Nan’s in 318 and I’m in 317. The lift takes two at a time. It’s explained to us that the two-person limit was introduced last summer, after a gentleman in a mobility scooter inexplicably attempted to drive into the lift when several people were already in it. I unpack and have a short doze, then go next door to check on Nan. She’s happy with the room but is a tad worried about the bath. She reckons the last time she had a bath she couldn’t get out. I tell her to stop underestimating her abilities. ‘I promise you, darling. I couldn’t get out. I had to yell for Grandad. But he was watching the golf with the volume right up. I was in there for two hours.’ I ask what happened two hours later. ‘Tiger Woods won,’ she says.

  The waitress explains that, as we booked late, our table’s a bit out of the way. I don’t mind, and nor does Nan. She can see more from here, and if she cranks her hearing aids up, she can still deduce the thrust of just about every conversation going on in the room. And there’s a fair few. The dining room is packed – there are three coach loads in this week. We’ve got a table for four to ourselves, so we sit next to each other rather than opposite, so we can see the same thing. Nan thinks everyone is looking at her.

  ‘Why are they all being so nosey?’ she says.

  ‘Because a bowl of soup and a partner of 50 years are only so interesting, Nan.’

  ‘Yes, well.’

  ‘They’re probably not looking anyway.’

  ‘They are. You’d think they’d never seen a …’

  ‘Seen a what?

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They must think you’re my toy boy.’

  ‘Oh sod off, Nan.’

  ‘I’m not joking. It’s what I would think.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘They probably think I’m being exploited.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They think you’re after my money.’

  ‘Oh steady on, Nan. You’re making me uncomfortable.’

  ‘Just eat your bread roll and don’t touch me.’

  It’s the taste and smell of dried oregano I most associate with Nan. When it comes to cooking, I mean. She used to put loads of it in her bolognaise. It was one part mince to two parts oregano, as far as I can remember. For her 80th birthday I got her eight grandchildren to each remember ten things about their nan – small things that have stayed with them over the years. I put all the memories into a block of text, colour-coded them, and then made it look nice and printed it out and framed it and so on. It amused me how many of the memories were food-based. My cousin Beth, who is 24, remembers most of all that Nan would always make her a bowl of plain pasta with cheese because she was fussy. My brother remembers the homemade carbonated drinks. I remember all the oregano I could possibly hope for. I enjoyed putting the thing together. It was nice just to sit down and remember.

  Not all my food memories relating to Nan are positive, mind you. When I was a student, she would send me off at the beginning of each university term with a box of stuff from the back of her cupboard. Trouble is, she had quite a deep cupboard at the time, and quite a relaxed attitude to expiration dates. I recall half a jar of Maxwell House coffee which passed its best in 1993 – a good fifteen years before it wound up in my philanthropy box. When I mentioned this to my nan years later, she said it was to build up my immune system.

  I ask what food Nan remembers from the 40s and 50s. She says there was lots of stew, and lots of soup, and bread and dripping, and—

  ‘Bread and dripping?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is that a pudding? Like bread and butter pudding?’

  ‘No, darling, it’s not a pudding. It’s the soft fat that forms when the juices from a piece of meat have cooled and solidified.’

  ‘Then what do you with that?’

  ‘Eat it.’

  ‘Are you winding me up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you lot have a death wish?’

  ‘It wasn’t that unhealthy. We had bread with it.’

  ‘And did you eat out much?’

  ‘What do you mean? Picnics and such?’

  ‘No, restaurants.’

  ‘Restaurants? There weren’t any. I wish I could take you to the 1940s, Ben – I think you’d learn a thing or two.’

  ‘There goes two gays,’ says Nan during her plum and apple sponge.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She nods towards two women, who have just got up from their table and left the dining room. ‘I should like to talk to them,’ she says.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘They’re bound to be interesting.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, all gay people are interesting.’

  As I’m wondering if it’s offensive to suggest that all gay people are interesting, Nan continues:

  ‘There’s a lovely gay man at the hairdressers I go to,’ she says. ‘Lovely as anything. Though I’m not sure about them adopting.’

  This has to stop. ‘Aren’t the curtains nice, Nan?’

  ‘I’m sure they would be wonderful parents, but the child would surely be teased.’

  ‘This melon is excellent.’

  ‘I’m all for them getting married though. In a church or wherever they want. After all, a woman who is twice divorced can hardly go on about the sanctity of marriage.’

  It’s nice to talk to Nan like this. Not necessarily about this – the hypothetical bullying of children with gay parents – but like this, at this pace, in this way, somewhat off the cuff, somewhat ad hoc, just chewing the fat, just riffing off our shared perspective. It’s unhurried and meandering. Not that talking with Nan is normally hurried or monotonous. I’m not saying that. It’s just that normally when I see Nan it’s at her house, an environment we’re both quite familiar with. There are no potentially gay couples in Nan’s living room. So the conversation, although nearly always pleasant and enjoyable and what have you, tends not to go off in unlike
ly directions – towards homosexuality, say, or bread and dripping. What’s more, when I visit Nan, the spotlight is usually on me, the visiting grandchild. Same goes for my cousins, I’m sure. She wants to know how school is, how university is, where I got those trousers from, what I think my sister is playing at, and so on. To my shame, I don’t often redirect the spotlight in her direction. But sat here like this, next to each other in the dining room of a Welsh hotel, looking out above the heads and across the tables, out towards the Irish Sea, our minds wandering, independently but somehow aligned, until one of those minds catches something and turns to the other and says, ‘There goes two gays,’ well, I kind of like it. Anyway, she’s back with her coffee.

  ‘No skimmed milk,’ she says. ‘Perhaps they don’t have the technology in Wales.’

  Downstairs is a ‘ballroom’. In effect, it is a bar and lounge with a small stage and dance floor, but in name it is a ballroom, and for that reason alone we resolve to pop down for a quick one. At first, Nan suggests that we sit separately to avoid stoking the rumours, but then comes to her senses. We’re just in time for the bingo, which will be called by the resident entertainer, Jim, who doesn’t waste much time before sharing his life story. To be fair, his CV is rather succinct: I used to be a Marine, now I call bingo. He doesn’t give any more detail, just leaves it there. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

  Not long into the first game, I realise that whenever I get a number Nan doesn’t, and vice versa. I think that’s how they print the tickets. If you buy two, all 90 numbers will be split between them. It’s a shame because it means we can never both be happy. Or maybe that’s not right, because Nan seems pretty pleased no matter what number comes up. In fact, she even gets visibly excited when I go on a roll, even though this means she’s doing totally rubbish. This doesn’t surprise me. Not really. I know for a fact that Nan would rather I won the bingo than her. And perhaps that’s just her, her personality, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with her age, for it seems to me that the longer we live, the less self-important we become, the less competitive. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m jumping the gun a touch regarding Nan’s age-related altruism, because I can see now – just after the end of the second game – that her selflessness only extends up to a point. With me out of the running early in that second game, Nan very nearly went on to get the win. She was one short. When the winner got up to collect his cash prize, Nan turned to me and said, quite seriously, ‘I don’t like him.’

  We call it a night after the bingo. I’m sure Jim sings like an angel, but that will have to wait for another night. I walk Nan to her room – I’m a gentleman like that – then watch something in Welsh while I do my teeth. I can hear Nan next door on the phone, chatting away to someone. Within a minute of her finishing the call, I get a text message from my mum. ‘Hi was just on phone to Nan. She thinks they all think you’re her toy boy. Have fun and tell them she’s your nan! xx’.

  17 Laverbread is an edible seaweed rich in iodine. The Welsh often serve it with cockles for breakfast. I suppose the thinking is that with a breakfast like that, things can only get better.

  18 That was only half the story, it turned out. My nan’s nan, Nellie Eliza, fell down the stairs, broke her neck, and died. Her teeth were never discovered, so it was assumed she’d swallowed them. She was put out to rest in the kitchen, with her mouth strapped shut with a tea towel. Then someone came round to plug all my great-great-grandmother’s openings. Of all the elements of this tragic occasion, my nan chose only to mention that a pair of teeth were swallowed.

  10

  Ask your mother while you can

  When I enter Nan’s bedroom at 8.45am she’s nowhere to be seen and the window’s open. Just when I’m thinking I must have said something wrong and she’s gone and absconded on me, she emerges from the bathroom and says, ‘I can’t find my teeth – have you seen my glasses?’ If our holiday were to end here and now, I would go home satisfied it was a good and momentous one, if only for that single question.

  I didn’t go into Nan’s room to see if she was there, but for toothpaste. I get the toothpaste then return to my room and brush my teeth watching BBC Breakfast. Dan Walker, the show’s co-anchor, is in the midst of an announcement: ‘So that’s the lesson for today, folks. Ask someone if they’re okay.’

  Religion is the morning’s topic of conversation. It started when I asked Nan if she believed in God. She asked why I was asking, and I said I’d seen a man cross himself before starting on his porridge. Nan says that she used to be religious, even going so far as to arrange her own baptism at the age of seventeen. She remained quite devoted to her church until she was kicked out for getting pregnant outside of wedlock. Turns out, Reverend Sparks grew concerned when my Uncle Michael arrived six months after Sparks had married my nan (to my grandad, that is), and it’s fair to say Michael hadn’t come by plane. Sparks cornered my nan after a Sunday service and asked if the baby had been premature. Nan didn’t much like what he was getting at, so replied, ‘No, he was two weeks late actually.’ Sparks responded by saying that he would have to discuss Nan’s membership of the church with the congregation. When he did so, it was decided that Nan was no longer fit for purpose. ‘So I washed my hands of the church,’ she says, ‘and haven’t been in one since.’ Go, sister.

  We’re gathered in reception, waiting for the minibus that’s going to zip us around town. A man is asking the receptionist if she could arrange for someone to help him with something, but the receptionist says she’s not in a position to do so, and encourages the man to visit the hospital, perhaps by taxi. It doesn’t look to me that the man’s in the mood for doing what he’s been told, not least because he’s joined the group waiting for the minibus, and is whistling a little tune and tapping his walking stick.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I say.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘I heard you at reception asking for help with something.’

  ‘Oh!’

  It transpires that Patrick needs help with his eyedrops each evening. He can’t manage easily on his own because he’s blind in one eye and can’t raise either arm above the shoulder. And nor, I presume, can he get his eyes below the shoulder and facing upwards.

  ‘So you just need someone to put the eyedrops in?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. My wife used to do it, but recently my neighbour’s been dropping in, if you’ll excuse the pun. And I don’t need to explain that my neighbour isn’t so obliging that she’s prepared to move to Llandudno to continue doing so.’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I reckon so.’

  ‘Well that’s settled then.’

  During our little tour of town, driver Owen fills us in. He starts with a word about the conception of Llandudno. It’s pleasingly put. ‘Purpose-built Victorian resort. The arrival of the railway useful to this end. The promenade’s two kilometres long and if you’re caught dropping a fag it’s a twenty quid fine.’ At the western end of that promenade, Owen asks us to consider the Grand Hotel, which is ‘positioned, as you can see, at the foot of the Great Orme, so-called because the Great and Little Ormes plus the land in between resemble a worm in Old Norse.’ While we try to decode this, Owen continues up and round to Happy Valley, a popular little park, of which he has this to say: ‘Unlike the Grand Hotel, Happy Valley is a misnomer in my book – I broke up with my girlfriend here and had a fight with my cousin the same afternoon. The two weren’t related.’

  Happy Valley is decorated with characters from Alice in Wonderland. The couple that Nan has earmarked as homosexual (which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to write) nip out to pose with the Cheshire Cat. Nan certainly likes the look of the place. She didn’t realise Llandudno had a connection with Alice, while I didn’t realise Nan was such an Alice fan. ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘I read them as a girl, and then again recently. Your Auntie Jo is having an Alice-themed party for her 50th. I’m going as a playing card.’

  Owen poi
nts out where Lewis Carroll would sit at the top of the park. ‘He sat there in order to come up with his books,’ says Owen. ‘Then this Alice girl turned up and started larking about on her own. Mr Carroll obviously saw some potential in the girl, because he just sat there watching her for three days. He was lucky to be living in more tolerant times, because if I did something similar today I’d be put on the rack until I agreed I ought to use a different park.’19

  Above Happy Valley is a dry ski slope, one of two in the region. Owen recommends the slope to anyone who’s ‘still got their original joints’. He says the same applies for the toboggan run, which at 750 metres, must surely be one of the ‘longest superfluities’ in the country. Nan’s bold enough to ask what a superfluity is. ‘A waste of time,’ says Owen.

  Next to the ski slope is the base of the cable car conveyance. From here you can ride up to the summit of the Great Orme. It was built in 1969. There’s been one tragedy of note. In 2007, a 33-year-old Polish woman jumped out and fell a fatal distance onto the rocks below. The last thing she said to her mother was that she was going out for milk. Of all the things I might think of given this information, I think of Dan Walker.

  We don’t take the cable car to the summit. Instead, we are driven there. When we get out it’s somewhat disappointing to see that there’s not much to see. The mist has seen to that. It’s an absolute pea-souper. Owen had whetted our appetite irresponsibly by saying that ‘on a clear day, you can see as far as Bolton, and with it Fred Dibnah up a chimney’. Someone remarks, unfairly I feel, that they never believed it would come as a blow not to be able to see Bolton.

  The first time I saw this grassy summit was on telly. It was a rerun of a Two Fat Ladies episode, which was filmed in the town. The titular ladies were Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright, a pair of chefs. As well as chefs, they were sizeable, posh, garrulous, far from spring chickens and not in the habit of counting calories. They were prone to topping cake with cake, and stuffing birds with caramel and bonbons. I remember finding the ladies exceptionally entertaining. They seemed to me to have more charisma and wit and personality in their bunions than today’s TV chefs have between them. In the Llandudno episode, they are tasked with producing a picnic for a local male voice choir. They do a Welsh lamb pie, a leek and potato soup, and baguettes filled with peppers, olives, tomatoes and anchovies. Jennifer considers the latter to be a delicious addition to the picnic, ‘despite its vegetarian overtones’. The two fat ladies wouldn’t survive on television today, I dare say; they’d be hauled off for offense to vegetarians, or for fat shaming, regardless of the fact that any questionable quips or cheeky slips of the tongue were atoned for tenfold with genuine joie de vivre and skill and charm and warmth; and no matter that between the pair of them they clearly had about as much malice as a bowl of custard – no, forget all that, off with them, the impolite, incorrect devils, may they be banished to Mantua, or BBC 3.