A New Town Neurotic
2002-04-03 || 7:55 p.m.

I'm happy today. Its been a simply lovely day. I'm still cracking on with my spring cleaning, although cleaning out my food cupboards today I'm ashamed at how wasteful I am. The weather has been great - about 70 degrees fahrenheit and I got my other Caterpillar sandal mended this afternoon as the buckle gave way at the weekend; a retrospective reaction to the cliff I climbed (by accident) in Devon last summer.

I much prefer these lighter evenings and the sun shining during the day. Really I appreciate all the seasons but the winter is a pain because of the damp which causes the black mould I've been cleaning off of everything these past few days; it means I can't get my clothes dry and the windows just drip condensation which makes the wood rot. The back bedroom window cill has rotted right the way through. But there's a smell of summer in the air now.

Talk about domestic goddess. There's only room for one of us in the UK, Nigella, and that's me. What am I cooking at the moment? Well Tuscan bean soup with home-made garlic bread, followed by rhubarb and strawberry crumble. All made by my own fair hands. Mind you, I bet Nigella's timings are better than mine. I started preparing the vegetables at 6 o'clock. Well, the preparation took me an hour and a half although admittedly I was listening to a tape which always slows me down. I finally got it all in the pan and then read the recipe (wrong way round I know) to find, firstly, that it says 'now leave until the next day'. Well fuck me, but I think I'll ignore that bit. Then it says cook for 1 hour then add cabbage and cook for 20 mins. So not only are we eating a la Tuscany but we'll be going by Tuscan eating times too. I reckon it will be ready about 9.15pm.

So to my tape. Rebecca was rooting around in the back bedroom last night and she kept coming out with tapes from ages ago. I was lying in bed and she was lobbing them at me from the doorway. She found a tape by a band called 'Outback' that this guy I used to know in Brighton sent me and then a tape I did from the late 80's. When I read the listings I thought it looked good. Wholly done from vinyl and I cannot tape from vinyl anymore because my turntable does not seem to be linked in correctly to my tape deck and I've tried but I'm too thick to sort it out. So basically, there was stuff on there I've not heard in yonks. Anyway, in homage to my superb compilation tape abilities and to preserve the track listing for posterity, here is what I listened to:-

side 1

Serpents Kiss - The Mission

Sanity Assassin - Bauhaus

Young, gifted and skint - NMA

The Hop - Theatre of Hate

Greenfields - MTCH

So Many Ways - James

Boys Don't Cry - The Cure

Damned Don't Cry - Visage

No Time to Cry - Sisters of Mercy

A Lover Sings - Billy Bragg

Happy Together Now - The Jam

Drop Down Dead - The Housemartins

side 2

Hardest Walk - Jesus and Mary Chain

Drag it Down - NMA

Mind of a Toy - Visage

This Town - June Brides

Heaven - Psychedelic Furs

Like a Hurricane - The Mission

Love Song - The Damned

Alternative Ulster - Stiff Little Fingers

Soldier - 999

Scarecrow - James

Firedances - Killing Joke

Original Sin - Theatre of Hate

Unloveable - The Smiths

In all honesty I listened to it all but I had to fast forward through 'Serpents Kiss' by The Mission. That actually sounded like a bag of shite.

A bit of a goth fest really. Some of the tracks tho' I hadn't listened to in years. I'd forgotten how much I liked 'No Time to Cry' and I had to stop and listen to that by putting my ear right up against the speaker, which explains why my Tuscan soup took so long. The Firedances too - another excellent track. And as for Original Sin, there's just something about it that sits right inside you.

The Cure are a group that are special to me. I accidentally saw them when I was a small child. They come from Crawley; a new town populated by people from South East London (Deptford, Peckham etc) bused in, in the 1950's and 60's. My grandparents were amongst them. They got offers to leave their flats in London and were given three bedroom houses in this new town. My step nan never stopped raving about how lovely it was until the day she died. When we were kids we always went to stay with them in the summer. My grandad was the most laid back lovely guy you could ever meet and my step nan was his opposite. She never stopped doing stuff. She played with us all day long. Took us out for rides, shopping, taught us to play cards (but only ever for money!), knitted so many jumpers she could clothe the nation. She grew her own fruit and veg. It must have been a dream to live there after Peckham. One day some time in the mid 70's we went shopping in Crawley town centre. This had a modern square of shops as the focal point with (bizarrely enough) an old fashioned bandstand in the middle. That day, the Cure were playing on it. I remember us watching and Freda saying what a noise it was and me agreeing (sadly) and then going on into WH Smiths to buy a book. Years later I realised who it was I had seen that day when I saw a bit of film.

Freda died 4 days before my birthday in November 1999. I was devastated. Going down to the house in Crawley for the last time on the day of the funeral was gutting. All my step cousins and their wives were there from the east end of London and my Dad's cousin and his aunt turned up. My cousin Lee had chosen the music for the funeral -'Angels' by Robbie Williams and 'We'll meet again' by Vera Lynn. It sounds corny but I've never listened to Angels since that day. My sister was late as usual and I was waiting for her because we had to write a message together for the flowers. In the end I had to do it myself because they needed to go in the hearse and so I wrote something like thanks for making our childhood special, for all the games and fun ... When my sister turned up I told her what I'd written and she said it was word for word what she had planned out the night before!

I remember my Dad saying to me at the funeral ' why are you so upset, she wasn't your real nan'. But she was. I never knew his mum and I think of her as my Dad's mum, not my nan. Freda was my nan.

A few months after she died I was sitting at work typing and suddenly out of nowhere came the smell of the Vim powder Freda used to use to clean her bathroom. Its a quite distinctive smell because its old fashioned and I just knew she was there.

So the Cure are Crawley and they are special.