Fish 'n' chips

It has taken me literally years to come to terms with Bank Holidays and to consider them to be a Good Thing. This is as a result of the trauma inflicted during a number of school holidays and my first university long vacation. The horror invariably reached a crescendo on August Bank Holiday Monday, but Good Friday was always the start.

The village has a surfeit of chip shops for its size. Three of them have café areas, or, as one where I worked liked to say, ‘fish restaurants’. It was a decent enough size and large numbers of people could be squeezed in due to strategic table positioning. But on a Bank Holiday, it was never big enough and from 11am, a queue started to snake its way along the street.

I would eye the queue with trepidation through the window. The worst moment – worse even than when the door was unlocked and they spilled in like bargain hunters on the first day of the Harrods sale – was when the granny buses went by. The grannies, complete with freshly set hair and a fancy for fish and chips on their day trip to the seaside, would nudge each other and point to the café. If they caught your eye, they would grin and wave. There was no escape.

Bus trips on top of the Bank Holiday hordes could easily induce a panic attack in a waitress of a nervous disposition. “Ethel doesn’t want peas, pet,” Ethel’s mate would say. Of course, when you have 30-odd orders for cod and chips (mushy peas came as standard – yuck) it’s easy to forget and blandly dollop bright green goo onto Ethel’s plate. Ethel, obviously, is upset and doesn’t want to pay for peas. You take her plate away and slide the fish and chips on to a fresh one. If the fish drops to the floor during this exercise, you pick it up and put it back on. You feel guilty for hating Ethel when she leaves you a tip.

Bank holidays were invariably sweaty, steamy, greasy, leg and arm-achingly awful. As the years passed, I got over it - until last Easter, when I almost had a relapse. Living in the bad place was just too close for comfort to the epicentre; the scent of stale fat pervaded the air and people filled the pavement, four abreast. I forced my car out of the alleyway, through the crowds, into a non-existent gap in the traffic – and fled...