Moira McPartlin's Blog

In 2011 I sat in the offices of Fledgling Press and signed the contract for my debut novel The Incomers. The then owner, Zander Wedderburn and soon to be new Fledgling CEO, Clare Cain, were as excited about the book as I was. Since then, Clare and Fledgling have gone on to publish the three books in my Sun Song Trilogy and have been a constant support to my writing career.

Fledgling Press have now closed their door, and Clare is embarking on a well-deserved retirement.  They have been a great publisher to work with right to the very last when all the files and copyrights were passed back to me.

In 2022 I reissued The Incomers through my own imprint, Trilleachan (add link), so I only had the trilogy to consider when Fledgling closed. Fledgling had already issued an eBook of all three books in a box set and I wondered what that would look like as a paperback too. Would anyone be interested in a book that was first published over ten years ago? More importantly, was it still relevant? I had after all started writing the trilogy in 2012.

The second question was the easiest to answer.

The Sun Song Trilogy is set in 2089 so before I began writing I embarked on some world building. Unfortunately, the world I built is more recognisable now that it was in 2012. And I need to get this blog out soon because it is becoming more real with each passing day.

The idea for the story came to me in a dream. This imagined world is divided between the Privileged few and the Native (Celtic) slaves. The way to establish a Privilege from a Native is through their DNA passport. If you don’t hold the right DNA then you are either harnessed into servitude or returned to your country of origin, whether it still exists or not.

This is a slide I created in 2015 to show school children what my imagined world looked like in 2089

The world is also divided into three superpowers The United States of the West, The Eastern Zone and sandwiched between them on the map is Esperaneo. This new superpower, formerly Europe, had to join forces to fight the threats from both West and East. The capital of Esperaneo is what was once Paris and the former UK is now Lesser Esperaneo (remember this was written before Brexit!) a tiny island that is slowly sinking in rising sea water. This severe flooding means that populations survive further north. Climate change has also created Desert States and an Earthquake Zone.

Another slide from the same 2015 presentation

The internet has been taken down because of fake news and heavy energy usage; it is replaced by a State-owned information service called FUB.

Many things are banned in this world, mostly due to climate change but not all.

Banned: Meat, books, immigrants, non-military transport, paper, exports & imports, fossil fuel, alcohol, free trade. In fact, just about everything.

Anyone who is deemed useless to the Privileged are erased. Some of this happened during a pandemic (I know!) and the elderly and disabled live in hidden communities, sometimes recycling hazardous waste to make a living. The only way society can function is through the help of an army of black marketeers called The Noiri, who are essentially a band of White Van Men (and Women).

The good news is that although The Sun Song Trilogy is future fiction becoming fact, it is a fast-moving action-packed read. The characters are real to me and relatable. It is a great read, and I feel The Sun Song Trilogy deserves a wide audience in its new format.

Synopsis

The year is 2089 and everything is changed. The revolutions of the early 21st century have created a world divided – between the Privileged few and the Native (Celtic) underclass.

Sorlie’s Privileged teenage life is smashed by the cruel death of his parents and he is spirited away to live with his ice-cold grandfather at a mysterious island penal colony. There he uncovers terrible secrets about the society he thought he knew.

Ishbel, Celtic slave and warrior, joins Sorlie in his quest for truth. Together they battle extreme weather and unknown enemies to unearth the Star of Hope, the ultimate tool to repairing their broken world.

The Sun Song trilogy explores life in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world where society’s norms have broken down and life must be lived differently.

You can view the trailer for Star of Hope, the last book in the trilogy, here.

The Sun Song Trilogy is available in eBook and Paperback from Amazon.

home office for a week

Okay, one thing is evident from this blog, which was last updated in August 2022 – I’m not a natural blogger. When I’m deep in a project I like to work on that project, to the neglect of everything else including my blog (and housework). I suppose this comes down to the fact that I reckon readers don’t want to know the detail of what’s going on in my life every week – if they are, snippets of activity can be found in my constantly updated Instagram account @moiramcpartlin

What this blog does do, however, is to chronicle significant happenings in my life. Last week I had a wonderful writing and life experience, and I just couldn’t let it go without blogging about it.

Cove Park Artists Centre first came on my radar in about 2007-08 when I drove there one day to visit Laura Hird, who was on a writer’s residency. I was astounded by the serenity and simplicity of the place and always had it as a goal to one day to apply for a residency of my own. I signed up to Cove’s mailing list and kept an eye open for suitable opportunities. At the beginning of this year I spotted a submission call for something called the Bridge Awards.

lichen covered wooden bridge

The Bridge Awards is a philanthropic organisation that provides funding for arts, community, healthcare and environmental projects. They fund individuals and organisations involved in the fields of literature, film, visual arts, theatre, dance and music. The 2024 Bridge Award was for artists and writers whose career had been impacted by a breast cancer diagnosis. I received treatment for breast cancer in 2016-2017 so qualified. I applied and was lucky enough to be accepted.

I arrived on Monday 20th May, a sunny afternoon that showed Cove Park at its best. Staff member, Karen showed me to my pod; a shipping container, craftily adapted into a fully equipped self-catering unit. Not only was the pod perfect for my living and writing needs for the week, but the glass wall looked out onto a small pond and beyond towards the west and the stunning hills of the Cowal Peninsula. I had planned to work on edits to my work in progress – A Thing So Delicate,* and I knew this was the perfect spot to do that.

Jacob’s Building, Cove Park

After I unpacked and made myself at home, I joined the other four awardees for a welcome drink in the Jacobs Building. In the interests of confidentiality, I won’t report any personal details about the others, only to say we immediately hit it off. A WhatsApp group was set up and we spent the week sharing our stories, our health experiences and most of all our working practices. We also had an opportunity to meet and get to know the other international writers and artists and learn about their work.

Park Director, the wonderful Alexia, hosted dinner for us on Tuesday night and we were joined by Lesley Howells, Maggie Cancer Care, Lead Psychologist. On Wednesday four members of the Scottish Ensemble joined us to deliver a wellbeing session. We assembled in a meeting room with fine acoustics and even finer views and as the musicians played they were accompanied by heavy rain and thunder which only added to the experience.

Four members of The Scottish Ensemble

Next day Lesley facilitated a stillness and internal dialogue workshop for us. I felt really pampered.

Although these events were optional it seemed a shame not to take full advantage of everything that was being offered by the Bridge Awards. I still had enough time to work on my own project and to take a forty-minute run in the surrounding countryside every day.

View from one of my runs

I would encourage all creatives, if you get a chance, to apply to Cove Park. The staff are amazing, friendly, helpful, engaged and caring. I would love to go back so will continue to receive their newsletter and scan for other opportunities to do just that.

Before leaving, we five Bridge Awardees had formed a special relationship which will carry forward into our own separate worlds.

Sunset view from my writing desk

* A Thing So Delicate – The Hidden Voices of Scotland’s Mass Concrete Viaducts

By Moira McPartlin and Colin Baird

‘A thing so delicate that the fairies might have built it’ JJ Bell, of the Glenfinnan Viaduct

A Thing So Delicate is a hybrid, high-concept project that tells the stories of Scotland’s major mass concrete viaducts built at the height of the Victorian railway mania. It is a creative and curated mix of nonfiction, social history, fiction, poetry, travel writing and fact files, as well as photographs. There are twenty mass concrete viaducts (plus many smaller arches) in Scotland, constructed between 1880 and 1904, in a bid to bring the railway and in turn prosperity to remote areas. The project is a collaboration between author, Moira McPartlin and her husband, civil engineer and photographer, Colin Baird.
@a_thing_so_delicate

So what is The Marcothon? It all started in 2009, when a guy called Marco challenged himself to run every day in November. His wife then deciding to follow suit and run every day in December, dubbed it the Marcothon and before she it knew it there was a group of runners eager to embrace the winter conditions of December 2009. In 2010, the group was added to Facebook and attracted over 500 runners from across the globe. That number grows each year.

The rules are simple you must run every day in DECEMBER. Minimum of three miles or twenty five minutes – whichever comes first. The challenge starts on December 1 and finishes on December 31 including Christmas Day. It’s not a competition but a personal challenge.  If you have friends who are also doing the challenge the added support helps keep you going.

As if running everyday isn’t enough of a challenge, I like to make it harder for myself. One year I tweeted my runs with a new hashtag for each day, then blogged about it here. Last year I wrote a Haiku everyday and the folk in my WhatsApp group joined me. We created quite a collection of Haiku.

How to top that? This year I went cryptic. Each day I took a photo during my run and in that photo would be something containing the number of the day, for example on day twenty I took a photo of twenty steps. I posted the photos on Instagram and often would share on Facebook and Twitter. As far I can tell no one caught on to what I was doing. Of course these numbers didn’t just fall under the lens, although some were easier than others. I often spent the last part of my runs cruising the area, planning possible shots. It helped that most of my runs were around the University of Stirling. If you look hard enough you can find numbers everywhere. One odd photo was the laundromat number 23 which was taken at the filling station on Alloa Road, the start of a favourite run around Blackgrange and Cambus. The last part of my Marcothon was spent on holiday in the pretty fishing village of Crail in Fife. Running on parts of The Fife Coastal Path was a pleasant change from the University runs.

Day 1

#onewomanrunning 

 

Day 2

#twoswansfeeding 

Day 3

 #threebouysbobbing 

Day 4

 #fourbarresfencing 

Day 5

 #fivesignslowing 

Day 6

 #sixlinescrossing 

Day 7

 #sevenskypointspointing 

Day 8

 #eightbirdswatching

Day 9

 #nineuniconeswarning

Day 10

 #tenowlsfreezing

 

Day 11

 #elevensummarking 

Day 12

 #twelveblocksseating 

Day 13

 #thirteenlogsracking 

Day 14

 #fourteentreesmatching

Day 15

 #fifteenbuswaiting 

Day 16

 #sixteenCascadiascoping

Day 17

 #seventeenHendersonStreetshopping

Day 18

 #eighteencitybikesparking

Day 19

 #nineteenGlycerinsglowing

Day 20

 #twentystepsclimbing

Day 21

 #twentyonelanesadding

Day 22

 #twentytwonumbersstretching

Day 23

 #twentythreewashessloshing

Day 24

 #twentyfourchaletshousing

Day 25

 #twentyfivebikerackspacing

Day 26

 #twentysixlamppostlighting

Day 27

 #twentysevenpalletsstacking

Day 28

 #twentyeightpostsstanding

Day 29

 #twentyninemarkerssaving

Day 30

 #thirtyperfectpitching

Day 31

 #thirtyonedonemarcothoning

 #lookingforwardtonextyear

 #marcothon2023

It is ten years since the first publication of my debut novel The Incomers. During that time many readers have read and loved the book and it is still selling and being enjoyed by new readers. Ten years is a long time for a novel to remain in print with the original publisher and the time seemed right to ask for my copyright back.

I am delighted to publish The Incomers through my own imprint Trilleachan Press. Although I love the original cover by Thomas Crielly, the novel needed a new cover. The Incomers is set in the fictional Fife village of Hollyburn. Hollyburn also features in Before Now, my last novel, so it seemed a sensible move to create a brand promoting the link between the two novels and a Hollyburn Series of books on Amazon’s market place.

Paperback copies of The Incomers can be purchased here from Amazon for the new price of £6.99, (Kindle £1.99).

Signed copies can be ordered direct from me for £10.00 (Inc P&P) using the contact form on this site.

I hope you like the new cover as much as I do.

I am honoured to have recently been appointed The Federation of Writers (Scotland) Scriever for 2022.

So, what is The Federation of Writers (Scotland)?

Here are their aims as listed on their website.

Bringing Writers Together

The Federation aims to support writers by making the whole process much easier to negotiate, from starting to write to publication. We can help you to find a writing group in your area, tell you where you can perform (if that is your wish) and help with the process of getting published.

We recognise that writing groups can be quite isolated and aim to offer them opportunities to meet by mounting seminars and workshops on key themes. The Federation provides a place for writers to sell collections and anthologies at our events, when appropriate.

We aim to:

Organise performance events

Develop a rolling calendar of writing events

Maintain a directory of writing groups

Issue a regular newsletter

Support people in the development of their writing

(source – www.federationofwritersscotland.com)

I have been a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) since almost day one.  I can remember the first AGM held about fifteen years ago in St Mungo’s Museum. At that time there was only a few dozen members. The president, Marc Sherland, handed out notes and asked us to write down what we wanted from this brand-new organisation.   What we came up with that day is still very much reflected in the Federation’s aims today and I am proud to have been part of that.

I was a relatively newbie writer at that time and I took advantage of all the performance opportunities that were held at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow. I also attended the GoMA writing group on a Thursday night.

I joined the committee as Finance Convenor, then became part of New Voices Press and for three years helped launch three anthologies as well as three poetry collections.

In 2012 my first novel was published and I moved abroad, so had to take a step back from my Federation work, but I’ve always been there in the background, posting opportunities on their Facebook page and sending items into the newsletter.

The Scriever is an honorary role and past Scrievers have delivered workshops, run competitions, produced articles and interviewed notable writers and industry professionals. As the Federation’s 2022 Scriever I intend to immerse myself back into the organisation.  I have lots of ideas and some exciting items already planned.

If you are a writer in Scotland why not consider joining?  More details can be found here.

Receiving the Scriever’s Shield from 2021 Scriever Leela Soma in a halfway café in deepest, darkest Stirlingshire

I have just finished reading Hungry by food critic Grace Dent. Dent was brought up in a working-class family in Carlisle and, in her excellent memoir, she talks with fondness and nostalgia about the food her family shared. Although the food wasn’t sophisticated or even that healthy, she obviously still appreciates this simple fare.

The reason I love this book so much is because her life resembles so much of my own characters in my latest novel, Before Now: Memoir of a Toerag. In my novel, Lily Smart (Maw), is a single mum struggling to feed her family on a pittance. Food is an obvious measure of wealth, so it features large in this story.

The first mention of food comes early in a chapter called The Shed. Gavin, the narrator, comes down to breakfast to find Maw has already left for a hill walk. She’s left him only ‘Hamemade broon bried’ which he later describes as ‘…boufin. That brick hard ye could stoat it aff the pavement’. Gavin is not impressed with his mother’s attempts at a healthy diet.

A few pages later finds Gavin and his brother Sam, making chips in The Chip Pan chapter. Chip pans were ubiquitous in the late 1980s – these disgusting pans with their baskets sunken in decades old beef dripping were normally of indistinguishable colour, scorched with welded on grease marks running down the outside. They were a source of many house fires. Gavin describes how his brother makes him chips and promises to make their usual, no-money Wednesday tea, fritters and egg. If you Google potato fritter now you will be tempted with recipes of finely grated potato coated in a concoction of gram flour, cumin and coriander. I used to make fritters for my kids, my mum made them for hers. Our fritters were slices of raw potato dipped in a batter of flour, salt and water, then deep fried. I can still recall the roasting potato burning the roof of my mouth. They sound disgusting now in our health-conscious age, but they were delicious, and I remember fritter and egg night being one of my favourites.

Chips!

At one stage in the story Maw tries to change Gavin’s diet because she believes she can control his hyperactivity through food. She makes him packed lunches which included home-made biscuits that are a hit in the school, especially with Gavin’s teacher who asks for the recipe. Of course Maw’s plan fails because Gavin swaps his healthy fare with his pal for sausage rolls and Tunnocks Caramel Wafers.

As Gavin grows, he’s able to earn his own money through tattie and berry picking. This allows him to buy his own food, Pot Noodles and the newest craze to hit the village, Azid’s Pakora.

Still a teenagers favourite

The Pot Noodle theme continues when Gavin and Maw travel to a concert in Germany by bus and despite her hatred of the dreaded noodle, Maw caves in because it’s all she can afford on the return journey.

There are many other food references in the book; grannies hame-made meat loaf, cheese toasties made on a toastie maker, and when Gavin has to fend for himself, he progresses to crispy pancakes and waffles.

Best served with potato waffles and beans

I had great fun remembering all the food we used to eat when my kids were growing up, food they wouldn’t look at now. I’m sure that is why books like Hungry are so endearing. They remind us of the days before we had heard of things like smashed avocado and extra virgin olive oil. I certainly tried hard to make the food references in Before Now as authentic as possible.

Before Now is available from Amazon. Signed copies can be requested through this website’s contract form for  £10.00 including posting and packing.

It is now almost a month since my latest novel Before Now was published. Amazon sales are going well and the reviews, so far all five stars, are piling in. My local bookstore, Guid Reads, has been selling dozens of copies and is restocking all the time. It is also stocked in The Book Nook Stirling, Made in Stirling and King’s Book Shop in Callander. And I am happy to say that my local library and the libraries in the adjoining counties are buying copies to add to their catalogues.

I have also had quite a lot of media coverage. Both the Dunfermline Press and the Alloa Advertiser have featured me and my book and you can read the article here.

Available from Amazon. For signed copies send a request through my contact page

The Booked programme on Pulse 98.4 FM is a good friend and supporter of my books. They have interviewed me for every book I’ve published. Booked presenter, Shirley Whiteside has a quiet, easy manner and gets to the nitty gritty of the book in a couple of easy questions. In past years I have travelled to the station for my interviews but this time the interview was conducted over Zoom.

My next interview, also on Zoom, was with John Murray, presenter of the Lunchtime Show on K107 FM, a Kirkcaldy station. Because Before Now is written entirely in the Fife accent, we talk all things Fife and John could relate to nearly all the episodes in the novel. I really enjoyed my interviews with both John and Shirley. You can hear the full interview with John in the link below.

K107 FM interview on John Murray’s Lunchtime Show

My new novel Before Now: Memoir of a Toerag will be published on May 31st. Here is a book trailer to give you a taster of what it’s all about.

My debut novel The Incomers, is set in 1966 and tells the story of mission raised Ellie Amadi, who leaves her home in West Africa to join her husband James, the factor of the Hollyburn Estate, on the outskirts of a small Fife mining village.

Before I began writing the novel, I knew that one way I could make it authentic was to incorporate food into the story and there were many ways I could do this. 

First, I wanted to show how Ellie compared Fife food with that of her homeland. Because of the Estate’s Big Hoose connection, I wanted to demonstrate how the ‘toffs’ lived and what extra ingredients they had access to. I wanted to explore the food of ordinary folk and, because the title of the novel is The Incomers, the foreign influences towards food – just about everything we eat has been introduced by incomers.

To begin my research, I thought back to my own childhood and the food my mum made for the family. You can read more of that in my last blog Nom-moir #1.

I interviewed a retired miner who had an allotment. Before being a miner, he had served in the Merchant Navy and he told me stories of strange food he had brought back from abroad – soy sauce being one that mystified his family. He told me, when he was a child, the big food influences were brought to his village by Italian families. Ice cream and of course pasta.

For the Big Hoose influences I was lucky to stumble upon The Murdostoun Cookbook in an antique shop. Murdostoun Castle is a country house in Lanarkshire and the cookbook was published in 1969 as a way of preserving the Castle’s old traditional recipes. Although I didn’t use any of the recipes in my story, just reading the foreward to the cookbook gave me a great grounding as to the running of a country house. Also, the food they grew in their gardens.

The 1960s Cook Book _ How the other half lived

For Ellie’s homeland food I had to rely on library books although I did travel to The Gambia before The Incomers was published. I visited a local market and had access to some of the produce mentioned.

Food market in The Gambia

Ellie’s first taste of Scottish food occurs when she is still in Africa.  One of the early scenes has Ellie at a Presidential banquet in her homeland hosted by James and catered for by the Scottish housekeeper of the Hollyburn estate, Mrs Watson. Canapés are handed round, and Ellie tentatively takes a taste of ‘The rough biscuit made from grain and topped with some kind of paste.’ This is oatcakes and venison paté.

When she arrives in Scotland poor Ellie has her first awkward encounter at the village shop. She is disappointed with the poor choice of vegetables – potatoes, onion, carrot, turnip, a skinny leek – ‘No cooking herbs, no plantain, no decent fruit.’ The shop keeper offers Ellie a sliver of the processed meat she is slicing. This is haslet and Ellie finds it disgusting.

When James presents her with a slab of grey fish and a bag of orange crumbs, Ellie doesn’t have a clue how to cook it. She fries the fish in butter and sprinkles the uncooked orange crumbs over the top. James is horrified, but the episode is followed by a tender scene where James teaches Ellie how to make chips. The fish van visits the village every week and the reader discovers that the local women prefer cod roe and something called Finnan Haddie, which is smoked haddock.

Ellie soon makes friends with Mrs Watson at the Hollyburn Estate’s big hoose and has access to the exotic vegetables growing in the walled garden. Ellie also learns how to grow her own food. Because the Estate owners have interests in the far east, Mrs Watson has a range of herbs and spices to share. She also gifts Ellie a book on native plants which allows Ellie to go foraging in the local woods. She makes cold remedies from raspberry leaves and a soothing poultice from thyme which she uses to treat a local girl, Mary. But these strange concoctions soon raise suspicions and Ellie is accused of witchcraft.

Raspberry leaf and thyme for making potions

An impromptu visit to Glasgow with James introduces Ellie to a more cosmopolitan Scotland. She spies a shop displaying vegetables she recognises from home. They stop and Ellie enjoys viewing what is so familiar to her.  The idea for this scene came to me from a childhood memory. My brother went to University in Glasgow and on a Sunday night I would accompany my parents as they took him back to his flat in Glasgow’s West End. I remember being fascinated by all the colours and strange shops on Great Western Road. Women in saris and men in what I thought were white pyjamas. Solly’s, the shop I used as my Glasgow shop would not have been around in the 1960s, but I am sure there would have been something similar hidden away in this eclectic thoroughfare.

Ellie soon becomes accustomed to her new way of life and the strange food but when she misses the fish van on Ash Wednesday, a day when Catholics cannot eat meat, Ellies finds she has a problem. This is solved when young Mary gives her a box of macaroni and the Macaroni Cookbook. Ellie embraces this new food in the same way the Scots embraced it when it was introduced to us.

A well used cookbook owned by my mum

The copy of the Marshalls Macaroni Recipes I own was my mum’s copy. A book made up of contributions from the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, an organisation my mum was a long-standing member of. I feel honoured to have this copy.

For a novel that is not about food, there are many more examples of food references in The Incomers. I think my desire to use food references has helped to make the novel authentic. If you read the book, see for yourself and try and spot all the food references.

Copies of The Incomers can be purchased here,

Or direct from my publisher, Fledgling Press and from all good book sellers.

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Before Christmas I completed a survey on Scottish food. I enjoyed answering the foody questions. When I noticed there was an opportunity to post some photos of my food on the survey I had great fun flicking through my photo archives. I hadn’t realised until then – I take lots of food photos, not just cooked food but food I grow in my garden.

This got me thinking. If food is so important in my life then maybe it creeps into my fiction. I didn’t have to ponder this for long. Yes, food features in just about everything I write.

With that in mind I’ve decided I will write a series of blogs about the food that appears in my novels. But before I do that I want to explore why and when food became important to me.

It begins with food poverty. Food poverty is big news at the moment and it featured in my life for a while.

I am the youngest of five so my mum had seven to feed and being the youngest I was at the bottom of the pecking order, yet still well fed. When I was small my family were not well off but there was plenty of food. Mum always made a pudding and big pots of soup and I now see that as her strategy for feeding us up. Breakfast was porridge with sugar and the cream off the top of the milk. She baked – not bread, which was shop bought and white, but cakes and biscuits and she made jam.

We had a food few traditions. On a Friday we always had fish and chips, rice pudding with carnation milk and pineapple chunks and a Blue Riband biscuit. After my brothers left home, Mum began to experiment with food, she joined the Women’s Rural and baked competitively.

I married when I was eighteen. My new husband and I moved into a tiny farm cottage with a second-hand cooker with only two working rings and an oven with a dodgy thermostat. I couldn’t cook but Mum was nearby to pass on her recipes.

My husband was a miner and although his wage was good, in those days and in that culture, the wife was handed ‘housekeeping’ and the rest of the pay was kept by the hardworking man. My minimal amount had to buy all the food and pay the bills. When it was gone there was no more.

My father-in-law was from Liverpool and was the unlikely source of some good food advice. When I was pregnant and anaemic, he suggested I drink the cooking water from cabbage, well peppered, to give me goodness. I don’t know if it worked but it tasted quite nice. He told me how to make ‘scouse’, a type of Irish stew but with less meat and more potatoes. I used lots of potatoes in those days.

My next-door neighbour in the cottages gave me a Simple Cookbook which I used most days because the recipes were easy and cheap.

My First Recipe Book

When my first son was born, we were appointed a local authority house. I had a full working cooker but higher rent to pay. Also the electric meter was card operated therefore more expensive and likely to run out if not enough credit was left in the meter. That meant food needed to be cooked efficiently. I remember we ate lots of processed meals like crispy pancakes and beef burgers. But like my mum I always made healthy soups and tried to bake; I would make the boys steamed puddings from my Be-Ro cookery book as a Friday treat.

Mum’s Be-Ro book on the left, mine on the right

My new house had a tiny garden and by the time my second son was born I’d cultivated a small vegetable patch and planted a herb garden at the back door.

All this economy in my early married life stood me in good stead for the miners’ strike of 1984/85. The council gave me a weekly food voucher and I would wander the supermarket aisle with my calculator making every penny’s worth of food count. A bag of potatoes, a cheap bag of frozen carrots and Bistro gravy could stretch a long away. A 15p swiss roll and Bird’s custard would give the boys their pudding for a couple of days. The boys were offered free school lunches but didn’t want the stigma that brought with it. They preferred to come home for lunch and I didn’t blame them for that.

Years later after I divorced and took control of my life, my boys and I ate well and I at last had some spare cash. I replaced the electric card metre with a normal one and found the motivation to experiment. I have never stopped experimenting with food.

 I’ve never forgotten those lean years. Food waste is almost extinct in my house and I never throw away a chicken carcass without first boiling it with a couple of bay leaves for stock.   

In 2008 after the credit crunch, I devised a series of money saving modules and delivered them to groups of mothers in deprived areas of Glasgow. One of the modules was on smart shopping and another was on microwave cooking. Many of the mothers had never had the opportunity to cook from scratch and spent much of their benefits on takeaways. They did not have my advantage of a mother who cooked. This was through no fault of theirs, it was a cultural fact. When they completed the module they were thrilled with the results and loved the dishes they could conjure up in under half an hour.

How to Beat the Credit Crunch – Course Content

Food poverty is big news again. Footballer Marcus Rashford and broadcaster Jack Munroe are leading the fight but despite their efforts some people still criticise low-income families, stating that it’s easy to survive on X amount of food. It is not. Being poor takes huge amounts of energy, just trying to figure out the priorities of balancing your meagre income with rising expenditure. And trying to feed a family on a pittance takes inventiveness, knowledge, and more energy. There are generations of parents who have never learned to cook. I was lucky, my mum laid down the basics and I picked it up from there. But even with that base line, I still found it hard, most weeks we only had chips and egg to eat on the day before payday.

My food poverty days happened forty years ago in the 1980s. Surely in 2021 we have the means to give families adequate amounts of good food to eat, and the right education to allow them to feed themselves.  

Revisiting my past – a fine plate of Scouse

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