I shall start this blog with a couple of literary references, neither as yet checked. My French is also not strong enough to be sure whether biscuits needs ‘perdu’ or ‘perdue’.
Anyway, Proust wanted to do a bit of rediscovering of the past, and managed something like that through the (for him) evocative taste of madeleines, the shell-like sponge cakes that you can buy fancy moulds for in nice cookshops.
I can’t claim that I’ve read Proust – and I am told that his Recherche de temps perdu is pretty long, so this could be deliberate on his part. However, I have now attempted my own equivalent, on a long weekend in and around Leeds.
I lived about seven miles outside Leeds between the ages of c. 4 and 7, in a village called Bramhope. A few miles up the road is Otley, a market town, and site of the hospital where my brother was born. At the time when you had to be born in a particular county to play cricket for it, it was heartening to know that he had got the best – Yorkshire.
Bramhope has now become quite posh, and we saw at least one DJ’s car (with souped-up number plate) as well as what are some huge houses. [Editorial note 2013: it’s also now famous for producing Olympic medal-winning triathletes.]
But this is still Yorkshire, where people are careful with money. The lady in the travel centre in Leeds would not allow us to buy two adult bus day tickets when we could buy a family ticket and save 20p. (I have to say that we also got slightly odd looks from the bus drivers that day, wondering where our brood had got to.)
Here comes the second literary reference. An ancient Greek writer claimed that it was not possible to step in the same river twice, because it was always flowing, so the water was no longer the same, even though the river continued. A good statement to bear in mind when revisiting former haunts, as time, like the river, does tend to move things on.
However, what amazed me that weekend was how much was still there, over 20 years on. One particular highlight was visiting the market in Otley, and finding that they still sold the same kind of ginger biscuits that we would buy there when I was a child. Not only that, but they sold them out of a mobile caravan type van, as they did years before.
The only difference was that now they are pre-bagged in plastic rather than sold in paper bags. This means that the stall holders can’t indulge in the knack of swinging the bag round by the top corners to form a seal, but otherwise it was very satisfactory.
Are the biscuits truly the same? Perhaps a little less gingery. But then I think this has more to do with my tastebuds tolerating spicier food than I might have done at six.
Sadly, I don’t know what Proust actually did when he got his madeleines. We bought two bags of biscuits and went back to Bramhope on the bus. A grand day out.