Snapshot: At the beach with Bess the dog
When I was 10 we got a labrador puppy called Bess. Here we are on her first outing: Druridge Bay on the Northumberland coast, the stretch of beach we always went to when we were growing up. I'm the one leaning back, pulling at my sister Liz with Shona, gamely sporting a large 1970s collar, is holding Bess.
It's a typically cold day but we are full of the excitement of the event; or at least I am, in my non-adolescent state. It's interesting that, even then, Bess has got her back to us, presumably narrowing her eyes at the sheep in the neighbouring field, speculating about the possibilities of savaging one. For this is a dog motivated solely by food, sociopathic in her inability to feel guilt, blithe in the face of any discipline.
As she grew up, she would often go missing for days on dustbin raids, returning bloated and farting, beside herself on potato peelings. She aspired to be a cat killer, and many times pulled me flat on my face, shredding my knees and leaving me to go home crying with the terrible news that I had lost the dog again. On visits to houses she had never been to before, she liked to do a huge turd in the middle of the carpet, her smug expression betraying her before the smell did.
She had her one true canine love, Barney, who lived on the smallholding we used to visit. Bess and Barney were a yellow and black item: they would play-fight for hours, stood on their hind legs with their front legs around each other's shoulders, mouth to mouth, looking like they were dancing. As she aged, she mellowed slightly and once I'd left home I only saw her on brief visits, gradually getting smellier and slower, swaying a bit in the wind and forgetting where she was going. Now, both my sisters have their own labradors and I am busy trying to adopt another rescue dog: we are all middle-aged now but just the same really. And we still think a dog is family. Joy Branigan
Playlist: Happier days thanks to these pipes
Pipes of Peace by Paul McCartney and Wings
"So let us show them how to play the pipes of peace / Play the pipes of peace"
Snow had fallen thickly over East Anglia in early January 1984 as my family piled into Dad's orange Fiat Strada for the trip to Norwich's Mousehold Heath, a mecca for tobogganists. There was a promise of milky hot chocolate on our return. As we set off from the village of Reepham, 12 miles north-west of Norwich, my nine-year-old head was spinning with the current playground chant: "1984, year of the nuclear war." That seemed to be all we talked about: even as innocent children, we were aware of Ronald Reagan, the cold war and the heightened tensions of this time. I distinctly recall an eerie and charged atmosphere, almost like the world really was on the brink.
Impending apocalypse was on my mind as we wound our way through the snow-clad Norfolk fields. I remember the car motoring slowly round a hairpin bend near a place called Swannington and hearing this song on the car radio. The discordant notes at the beginning coincided with a swirling, fresh fall of snow, but soon the reassuring voice of Paul McCartney, soft and sweet, began: "I light a candle to our love / In love our problems disappear."
It had been No 1 over Christmas, but I hadn't paid much attention to Pipes of Peace until then.
I gazed at the patchwork of white fields and thickly falling snowflakes as the song built to a swell with its message of world peace. I had a sudden sensation of wellbeing, awash with the boyish joys of snow and toboggans; the benign and friendly white blanket gleaming outside, as the band played on: "So let us play the pipes of peace."
Other, happier thoughts came now as images of nuclear fallout slipped from my mind: the hot chocolate I would have when we got home, the numbness of my fingers inside my gloves, the blue plastic toboggan in the boot and racing my sister down the rolling hills.
It is my "madeleine moment". Every time I hear the song, I am taken back to those snowy fields and that boyhood day, displacing the real-world concerns that had prematurely become my worries. Back home, after some slaloming on the snowy slopes, I cupped the hot chocolate and all was right with the world. Aaron Spicer
We love to eat: Mum's homemade marmalade
Ingredients
2lb (0.9kg) Seville oranges
1 unwaxed lemon
4lb (1.8kg) granulated sugar
4 pints (2.3 litres) of water
Squeeze out the juice of the oranges and lemon, placing the pips in a square of muslin laid over a sieve in a bowl. Cut the fruit and put into the preserving pan with the juice and water.
Tie up the pips in the muslin with string and tie on to the handle of the preserving pan, so it sits in the juice and water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 1½ to 2 hours until the fruit is soft.
Roughly chop and then puree the skins. Return the fruit to the pan with the juice/water and add the sugar. Stir over a low heat until all the sugar is melted. Boil for 15 minutes, then check if the mixture has set by spooning a little on to a cold saucer. If the skin crinkles, it has set. If not, boil for another five minutes. Leave to settle for 15 minutes then spoon into clean, warm jars.
Mum wasn't a cuddlesome woman, but she showed her love through cooking. A typical Irishwoman of the 1940s, she would offer you a "little pick to eat" and three hours later, you would finally roll, groaning, from the table. But her food was always made with care and from scratch. Despite our pleas, she refused to buy tinned tomato soup ("orange muck!"), and after reading the ingredients on the back of a cereal packet, loudly announced that there was "more nourishment in the box". My sister and I associated her with lovely cooking smells and every January the house was filled with the zesty scent of her annual marmalade extravaganza.
The resulting marmalade had a fresh depth of flavour unequalled by the best commercial type. We would spread it on her wholemeal bread. Delicious, but it took what felt like three hours to toast, causing huge embarrassment when I was making scrambled eggs on toast at school and everyone else brought sliced white.
Another time we were making sausage rolls at school and Mum had mixed fresh herbs and garlic into my sausage meat. The classmate next to me started shrieking "Euggh, garlic!" like a disgruntled vampire. Oh the shame.
Why couldn't Mum provide us with flabby white bread and bland pink sausage meat? Only as adults do my sister and I appreciate that our stable weight and lifelong health was a direct result of Mum's food. A huge gift.
Mum died last year, and a few weeks after her funeral I was reaching into the back of the kitchen cupboard and found a last jar of her marmalade. I sat with the jar cradled in my hands and cried. It was a last tiny piece of her. Jane Purcell
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