Honey Bears & Honey Flat Breads

A Lady P memory and a Top Banana recipe

Company is coming. Clean up fast. Especially if its cousins. Or any family member for that matter. They always make me nervous, perhaps because I was the youngest of 10 very close cousins and siblings from two very close sisters. I had a lot to live up to. So, when a family event is on the horizon, I go into sizzling over-drive. Not just the normal scampering around shoving stuff into cupboards, but into hand-painting invitations-pressing our great grandfather’s embroidered napkins kind of overdrive. Add on a touch of polishing the silver (none of it now matches but I think that’s OK) and picking wildflowers from the garden, with a few bought in panic from the supermarket, added in and hopefully undetected in the assembled arrangements.

Just after my mother’s sister, my beloved Aunt, died, I invited said cousins and siblings for a dinner so my mother could feel the warmth of her family still around her. Except it wasn’t warm, it was bloody freezing. I thought we would be too squashed in our kitchen and had the bright idea of setting up in the garage. It did not take long to drive out the cars, sweep up the dust, unfold the stored tables and chairs, use a long stretch of fabric that one day was intended to recover a sofa and even hang a spare painting on an oak beam. Candles, piles of logs, a few firepits and a view out to the golden wheat field I thought set the scene. In fact, the last of the summer slipped away just as the candles were lit. Sun turned to rain and a wind whipped up around us, whooshing up not only the neatly folded napkins, the lady’s dresses but also my mother’s immaculate Elnetted hair. But, in that damp garage on that shivery evening it was the words spoken and the memories revisited between cousins and siblings that mattered, not the bread rolls blowing off the table. My mother, in her inimitable style, told us about the time their honey bear behaved badly at tea time…