Slightly off theme — but not really — is the topic of food in the typical family household, and how it was lived, shared, and truly consumed when I was a child and young man. I was born in the late 60s, growing up through the 70s and 80s. If you’re young while reading this, I can already hear you say, “Oh here we go again — back in the days when I was young…” The typical cliché. But if you are wise, you will read on — and learn what it used to be like, and how it still should be.
Sundays were my favourite days. They meant a full tummy of home-cooked food and a pudding made with love. Every Sunday was a visit to my Grandma and Grandad’s — a working-class couple who lived in a council house, humble yet proud, who built a life from effort and care. Even back then, they lived a life of quiet self-reliance — a way already fading from the world, yet still alive in their hands.
Grandad grew his own vegetables and salads, his garden a small Eden behind the house. He was a woodworker too — shaping what he needed from what the Earth provided. Grandma cooked everything from scratch; even the condiments were handmade. Her mint sauce, my favourite, could wake the soul. She sewed, knitted, and made garments that still exist today — woven threads of memory.
Dinner was simple, honest, and real. Whatever meat they could afford that week — sometimes a leg of lamb, which felt like a feast — surrounded by Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes with rosemary from the garden, carrots, cabbage, and a gravy drawn from the life of the meat itself. And when it was lamb, that mint sauce sang of the garden’s green heart.
Pudding was its own kind of prayer. My favourite was rhubarb crumble — tart stems from the garden mixed with brown sugar, a hint of ginger, and a crumble of real butter. The custard poured over it, golden and thick, like a blanket of love.
As my own grandson of eighteen months would say today: “Deeeelicious.”
But behind the flavours was the unseen labour — Grandma in the kitchen for hours, Grandad tending the soil, all of us joining for the washing up. That was part of the ritual too: the sharing of work, the gratitude that followed.
Grandma’s dinners are a treasure I return to often — not just for the taste, but for the lesson. They were rituals of tradition, love, and belonging.
Even school dinners held that spirit once. In the 70s and 80s, a team of cooks worked from early morning to serve meals that were handmade and balanced — meat, two vegetables, and pudding. I loved my food, though I was tall, slender, and forever running about. The smell down the corridor before lunch was pure anticipation.
Those school kitchens still exist today, but stand silent — relics of what once nourished both body and soul. The meals now are outsourced, processed, portioned for cost. Packaged health that hides hollowness. My eldest grandson’s school even offers a Greggs sausage roll as a main meal option. How did we allow that?
When I was a child, a day’s food was simple: a small bottle of milk in the morning, a handmade dinner at noon, and an apple at playtime. Nothing was wasted, nothing was false. The cooks knew the children’s names. The food was part of the rhythm of life.
Now the soul, pride, and love have been stripped away — replaced with convenience. Yet the memory remains — and memory, if tended, can seed renewal.
Perhaps that is what we are being called to remember: that food is not just fuel. It is communion — with the Earth, with the hands that grow and prepare it, and with the generations that came before. To cook is to pray without words. To share is to honour life itself.
And in a city like Manchester, where concrete often hides the soil, that remembrance is its own quiet revolution.
A Fond Memory of My School Dinners
How vividly I remember that painted scene on the wall at Baguley Hall Junior School — the whole city alive in colour. Trains winding beneath rows of bright houses, the church spire rising above rooftops, a windmill turning slowly in the painted sky.
To us, it wasn’t a mural — it was a window. Each lunchtime, as we queued for shepherd’s pie or rice pudding, our eyes wandered into that other world. The children in the painting seemed to move; and you could almost hear the choo choo noises of the trains. For a few moments, the school hall felt lighter, as though imagination itself had pulled up a chair beside us.
It gave those noisy, joyful dinners a subtle spiritual lift — not religious, but radiant. Something about that wall reminded us that wonder belongs to everyone, even to children holding chipped plates and laughing over sausage, mash and gravy: “Deeeelicious.”
That mural held a quiet kind of magic: a harmony of colour, play, and innocence that whispered to the soul, life can be bright, even in ordinary places. And as we left the hall with full tummies and happy chatter, a part of that painted light seemed to stay with us.
Wild Manchester Reflection
Today, as we move through aisles of fluorescent abundance and call it choice, the real nourishment we hunger for is belonging — to the land, to one another, to the quiet rituals that make a meal sacred. Wild Manchester is about that return. It’s about finding the garden again, even in a city street; about planting herbs on a windowsill, cooking from the heart, and remembering that the wild still whispers through us — waiting to be tasted once more.
This reflection below connects with the topic explored in the article above.
