When I was little we used to play in graveyards. We’d scramble round headstones like little Dylan Thomases de nos jours (or de those jours: it was the 1970s then). Me and Andrew Gibbins dived for cover from a runaway horse once, behind the headstones in Hafod Park. Me and Tabitha tried to raise the spirits in the one in Waun Wen. In those days, great mobs of children would run screaming all round town, claiming that they’d just seen a ghost. With a churchyard on every street corner you could never escape the dead in Swansea.

The graveyards of my childhood were plain, austere places with serried ranks of unadorned stone bearing simple inscriptions. Wales is a country where the merest hint of decoration in church (or, rather, chapel) is an affectation dangerously close to Rome. Also, there were no rich people in Swansea, so you never saw any ornate marble mausoleums.

Yet there were thrilling glimpses into other worlds for a child with an overactive imagination. There was the Jewish burial ground perched on top of Townhill, which was always locked, so that you had to scale its tall wall to peer in at the impenetrable Hebrew script, which seemed impossibly exotic to us in our circumscribed world. Or there was the grave in the Gower with the name of the murderer chipped off the headstone of his victim.

This interest in graveyards stayed with me as I grew up and began to travel. I’ve paid my respects to Marx in Highgate and Wilde in Père Lachaise, swooned at Dietrich in Friedenau, left cigarettes for Serge and snubbed de Beauvoir and Sartre for Jean Seberg and Duras in Montparnasse.

And then, after I’d been hunkered down in Amsterdam for three years, it dawned on me (the dawn of the dead?) that I’d never once visited a graveyard here. The hesitation was due in part to the fact that the dead are kept at arm’s length here – and for good reason. In a populous country literally built on water, the last thing you want is the dearly departed leaching into the soil and water supplies. (Cemeteries started springing up outside densely populated areas towards the end of the 18th century, but this precaution wasn’t enshrined in law until 1866). If you want to find the dead here, you have to go and look for them at or beyond the city limits.)

And then, of course, there’s Dutch culture. It lacks big names known abroad – except, of course, for the well-known artists. But even here, the people most of us know best were buried in pauper’s graves (Rembrandt) or interred abroad (Van Gogh). You have to get to know this country before you can learn to love its dead.

But here I was, armed at last with some language skills and cultural knowledge. It was time to start exploring. Any journey through Amsterdam’s cemeteries has to involve one of the biggies – the Nieuwe Oosterbegraafplaats in Watergraafsmeer or Zorgvlied on the banks of the Amstel, both rivals for the ‘Père Lachaise of Amsterdam’ laurel. Each contains notables, but the dead seem to be divided between them. The one contains those who flexed their brains and the other those who enjoyed the pleasure of the senses.

In the Nieuwe Ooster you’ll find poets, politicians and painters aplenty. This cemetery was recently a focal point of attention when polymath film-maker, journalist and provocateur Theo van Gogh was cremated there last November. Zorgvlied, on the other hand, has circus masters, nightclub mavens and punky junkies on its side. Ever conscious of a similar tension in myself between good-time girl and swot, I toss a coin to see what side of the Cartesian split I’ll pursue this time.

Heads it is: the flesh wins out.

Zorgvlied occupies a magnificent position on the road to Oudekerk, along the banks of the Amstel. The riverside spot means it’s ideally placed for waterborne send-offs, and if you want evidence that this place is a departure lounge for sybarites, then look at Manfred Langer’s gravestone. Up against the railings and visible from the road, it features a life-size statue with priapic peaked cap. When he died in 1994, the iT club impresario’s pink coffin was brought here by boat along the Amstel, complete with an entourage that included pumping music and grinding go-go boys. Now vodka bottles are scattered at the base. It’s what he would have wanted.

Standing here, the cemetery – which opened in 1870 – looks pretty small. But once you wander the landscaped lanes (the work of one Jan David Socher and his son) you realise the full extent of it. In fact, it’s a 15-and-a-half hectare necropolis. The oldest section, which was part of the original, much smaller 0.8 hectare site, is on the right as you enter from the Amstel side.

They say that death is the great leveller. But wander in a graveyard and you’ll see that the rich must have their palaces and their seclusion, even in death. Follow the path that curves off to the right, and you’ll tombs that help to make this city make sense. Here’s a Krasnapolsky. There’s Oscar Carré. His great, gated sarcophagus is a good 20 feet tall. It has two Corinthian columns and a roof like a proscenium arch. The circus owner was laid to rest in a scaled-down version of his theatre.

Grander still is the Dorrepaal tomb, the most extravagant I’ve seen anywhere in the city. Unfortunately, information on the family is scant. Whoever they were, they must have been rich, since a life-sized carved angel lays a full-sized stone wreath in an enormous wooden pavilion. Despite the showing off, the grave isn’t meant for prying eyes: you have to clamber up and crane your neck to get a glimpse of the inscriptions, and railings keep back the hoi polloi. I wonder what their house was like?

You couldn’t find a bigger contrast than with Annie M.G. Schmidt’s memorial. While the Dorrepaal’s is forbidding, the writer’s grave has a much more human scale. Visitors, and there must be many,  judging by the gewgaws left behind, place miniature jenever bottles and pottery figurines there as cosy tributes to the storyteller. With its pastel-coloured tiles and gleaming glass surfaces, her tombstone has all the reassuring domesticity of a kitchen.

This abandoned individuality, the lack of gravity of many of the gravestones here, is likely to make foreign eyes (especially sober Welsh ones) pop. They don’t go in for buffed-up granite here, gosh no: here you’ll find graves made of anything from stained glass to chrome to stainless steel. You’ll see hand-made graves and hand-painted ones, and there are Amsterdammetjes galore. And there is another culture shock for repressed Brits: the family graves that display name and date of birth but – not yet, anyway – no date of death. How does it feel to stand at the graveside and see your own name there, waiting? How must it feel to be reminded of your own mortality in such a direct way?

The most chilling one I saw was a twin grave that showed two names, two dates of birth and no dates of death at all. Do the future incumbents ever visit it?

There are some other sombre shocks, too, to shake you out of the island mentality you never knew you had. There’s the grave of Willem Wouthuyzen and Esther Ricardo, who lived in Amsterdam and died in Auschwitz, for instance. However much people in the UK may obsess over the Second World War (and believe me, they do) the horrors of occupation were unknown there. That never really hits home until you become aware of things like this.

And the horrors of wartime occupation are immanent here. By the gates of Rustoord on Weesperstraat in Diemen, for example, the first thing you see is a small memorial stone which reads: TER GEDACHTENIS AAN HEN DIE VIELEN IN DE JAREN 1940-45 DOOR DE HAND VAN DE BEZETTER EN RUSTEN OP DEZE BEGRAAFPLAATS. That means: ‘To the memory of those who fell in the years 1940-45 at the hands of the occupier and who rest in this cemetery.”

Next to the main road, beneath a rattling railway bridge, the spot is suitably grim for such memories. There’s no sheltering greenery or respite from the starkness of death here. Yet it’s one of the most instructive graveyards I’ve visited. Make your way through the grand slabs of graves near the entrance, in the oldest part of the cemetery, where the wealthy have nabbed the best positions (as in life, so in death) and go to the border on the railing side.

A few graves into the new section, on the far left, you should see a great big hunk of highly polished red and black granite. This is the Hell’s Angels’ Broederschap grave. Within lie seven Angels, each of whom was true to the ‘live fast, die young’ dictum, since not one of them made it beyond his forties. The grave – decorated with Christmas baubles and empty JD bottles when I was there – bears the legend AFFA 8118. These palindromes must be meaningful to other Angels, but I’m baffled: like the Dorrepaal’s frill of iron railings, its function is to exclude outsiders.

That insider-outsider dichotomy keeps recurring. A few rows behind the Hells Angels, the Muslim section (dating from the 1970s) begins. You can see the influence of the orient in the fluid elegance of the headstones, some in Arabic, some in Dutch, some in both. A trim hedge divides this section from the rest of the cemetery. It’s part of the bigger whole, but it’s also separate from that whole. I don’t think there’s a neater metaphor for Dutch society.

Nor can I think of anything more bizarre than the pets section, at the very centre. Athos is buried here, and Samson, and a dozen other pets of undisclosed species but specified age (eight, 12, 14), with toy windmills spinning on top. At first I thought I’d stumbled across the children’s quarter, until the odd names made me look closer. It all seems a touch distasteful, in the midst of so many dead humans. No wonder the hedge around it is so high.

Leaving the pets behind, I pick my way through the old part. Here, on the left-hand side as you face the road, a few graves down from the gardeners’’ sheds, is the tomb of the Ansingh family. The last interment, on 14 December 1959, was the painter Lizzy. It’s falling into disrepair now, cracking and subsiding a bit. Funny, isn’t it, how the dead can make the city come to life? From this moment on, Lizzy Ansingh will no longer just be some street name round the corner in De Pijp, but a woman who lived and had a family and died, and whose grave I’ve stood beside. Things fall into place. And your thoughts return to the Second World War as you pass the memorial on your way out again.

They come back again, these thoughts, in Huis te Vraag, on Rijnburgstraat. So many people buried here, you note, died in the first half of the 1940s. Is it coincidence, perhaps, a natural part of the ‘life’ of the cemetery, if you like? This graveyard was opened at the end of the 19th century and closed at the beginning of the 1960s. Or did they fall, like those commemorated at Rustoord, at the hands of the occupiers? Maybe the exigencies of war just wore them out. The grave guards secrets you’ll never know.

That’s what they should do, graveyards: spark your imagination, set you wondering as you wander. At Huis te Vraag, you slip through an unobtrusive entrance to find yourself in a world that looks like it’s straight out of Tennyson’s In Memoriam: cracked stones, gnarled trees, sinking tombs ensnared in ivy. Its pleasures are subtle. There are no big names here, no marble vaults, just ordinary people who did ordinary things and who lie in ordinary graves. But look around and you can learn things it would take an age to research in history books and public records: life expectancies, occupations, what names fall in and out of fashion.

And it’s beautiful here, peaceful and overgrown. I think of Tennyson’s poem: ‘the path that each man trod was dim, or will be dim with weeds.’ Or, as is the case in this country, that path will probably be swept away, one day. (Under Dutch law, a graveyard which has been out of use for 50 years can be cleared and the land reused.) This is a valuable piece of land, next to the Schinkel. In the case of Huis te Vraag, that date (2012) is creeping ever nearer, so you should go and ramble while you can

As for me, I’ve got work to do. I want to look at that behemoth, the Nieuwe Ooster, and the Westgaarde crematorium, where volkszanger André Hazes had his send off in the summer, and the Sint Barbara, up by Sloterdijk. If you go and you see anything dead good, let me know.

Published Amsterdam Weekly 20-26 January 2005. (And in memory of Andrew Gibbins, 1970-2009.)

Second-hand book shopping isn’t an addiction. It’s more of an impulse. You don’t spend day after day seeking out the next fix, but it’s lodged in your genes and whenever you pass a musty tower of paperbacks, some reflexive muscle launches you at them. You never know what might be in there. Another old Fodor’s Modern Guide, for example, to go with 1957’s Switzerland, with Liechtenstein (Ralph’s Books, Dillwyn Street, Swansea, 1991, though originally owned by one KA Linscott, Oxted, June 1957, and a snip at 50p).

Second-hand book shopping is a refuge from modernity; you won’t find instant gratification nestling among the curling, foxed pages. You do it because you have no clue what’ll turn up in those ramshackle stacks. You do it because it’s a two-fingered salute to Amazon, that dreary experience which is entirely about known quantities, right down to what Nina in Ohio thought about your next buy.

It’s not about getting cheap, hard-to-find or out-of-print books, though it’s all of these things. Nor is it about discovering a book you want but haven’t got – though you might well find one (Marguerite Duras, The Whispers of Love, Spui Boekenmarkt, April 2001, 8fl) – more often, it’s about buying a book you already own and love in every different edition you can find.

There’s something comforting about buying used books; it makes you feel immortal. You must always write your name, and the time and place of purchase on the flyleaf. Not for your own benefit – because you always remember precisely when and where you bought it – but for future readers. William Jones of Tyn yr Heol scratched his name and the date, Oct. 16^th 1864, in black fountain pen into The Child’s Guide to Knowledge by A LADY (Dylan’s, Salubrious Passage, Swansea, March 1993, £1) and its pages reveal that this poor Victorian child was tested on the – improbably esoteric – contents. (“Q: Are not vast quantities of sturgeon caught annually in the Caspian Sea? A: Yes; and from a species called the starred sturgeon, the best caviar and the strongest isinglass are obtained.” TICK. Poor William. Do you think he was beaten senseless with a rod if he got one wrong, as he did on page 282, “Q: What is chyroprase?”*).

You get glimpses into other times and other lives with pre-owned books that you never get in new ones. The Fodor’s Modern Guide to Morocco (See am pattern emerging?), picked up for €1 at’t Ouwe Boekje, Graventsraat, Den Burg, Texel, June 2002, is full of clippings, jottings, mementoes. We know its old owner went to Rissani, UN CADRE TYPIQUEMENT MAROCAIN, in Casablanca, and that he or she obsessively snipped bits about the country from magazines. The same owner, I suspect, also visited Austria (€2), drove down the Brenner motorway on 12 April 1969 (60 schilling toll) and, 30-odd years later, left me some empty sugar bags and a very nice Werfen im Salzachtal sticker. You don’t get that in Scheltema.

Second-hand book buying, then, is a serendipitous thing. You don’t decide what you’re going to get, or when you’re going to get it. And there is no place in the world that better encapsulates this form of shopping in all its glorious randomness than Sporadisch Antiquarisch on Sarphatipark. It is, as the name yells you, an on-off thing (the only regular opening hours are Saturday 2-4 and even that’s not guaranteed), piled up with a disorder of reading matter. Outside, there is also a bargain windowsill of the most unpredictable books, at 50c a pop. Perfect. This shop is where I have culled some of my best finds, ever.  I remember one sunny Saturday afternoon in April 2003, riffling through the outside tables and coming across the garish, sensationalist cover of a 1960s gay pulp fiction paperback. And another. Then another and another and another. This was pay dirt, and at €10 per half dozen! I came away with two carrier bags full of the buggers and each is a sociological specimen.

We begin in 1965 with James Barr’s Quatrefoil, a sub-Querellian (complete with matelot and cap’n on the cover) self-hating wank-piece masquerading as a serious study. “An unforgettable – deeply moral – adult novel…” trails the back blurb. “The chest and thghs, heavy against him and hot with an animal vitality that Phillip could feel through their wet clothes” reads the quite random page I opened.

As gay lib is invented, the tone changes. HOMO House of Male Order (1968) by Bert Schrader is a ridiculous tale of a knocking shop in the Midwest. Despite it’s straightforward porn talk (a new direction), it’s really a romance and consciousness has most definitely been raised: “Spud shrugged. ‘What do you call them?’ ‘gay or even homo after you get to know them but queer is not a word that they like.’”

The last books in the collection, from the early ’80s, are dark, sexually complex literature (like John Rechy’s Rushes) a million years from the internalised homophobia of the early works. ‘Nico van Dalen’ is written in red biro inside Quatrefoil. In my imagination, he is an old gay man, no longer with us, whose possessions were sold off – no heirs, you see – and who experienced seismic shifts in attitudes to being gay, both in the outside world and inside himself, then bequeathed it all to me with his library.

A few months later, I was walking past Sporadisch Antiquariat and saw a copy of Paint Along With Nancy in the window. Nancy Kominsky was an ur-Bob Ross, whose how-to-paint programmes I watched every dinnertime at 12.30 p.m. on HTV Wales in teh late 1970s. Of course, I went back to the shop every day until I found it open and when it was, I snatched up Nancy. The owner asked if I wanted it for kitsch value; I put him right and told him, no, there was nothing ironic here: this book unleashed real emotion. I often wonder what funny journey brought this book to Amsterdam.

I did think of taking some of my finds back to the Antiquarisch, holding each one up and asking the owner: “Remember this? Or this or this?” and getting the history of all my lovely books.

But I couldn’t do it.

I might find out the truth, you see; and that, dear reader, would spoil the story.

*“A: A beautiful stone of a delicate apple-green colour, much prized by jewellers, brought from Silesia, in Germany.”

Published in Amsterdam Weekly, 16-22 February 2006. 

Van Woustraat. Unless you live in De Pijp, you probably never visit this traffic-clogged artery road. And even if you are its denizen, no doubt you never go to the eastern reaches to eat; that’s what Frans Halsstraat’s for, right?

If anyone connects Van Wou with eating out at all, then it’s probably with late-night drunkards shovelling down kroket from holes in the wall at Febo and Barbarella, dried-out lahmacun, or what is poetically known in the UK as “shaving the elephant’s leg” – doners from one of the street’s 11 (count ’em!) kebab shops. The pavements here run red with the chilli sauce spilled in recent ‘kebab wars’, a price-slashing skirmish that sees the current rate for a stuffed pita pocket at Genco (number 159) and bitter rival Leeman (No. 160) down to €1.95. The priciest shoarma on the strip is at Eethuis Ora (No. 123) – a vertiginously steep €2. Stick around here long enough and they’ll be paying you to eat.

But wiping away the grease smudges reveals that van Wou’s oleaginous reputation is slowly oozing away. Bog-standard Thai is being shouldered out by authentic Japanese riyouri like Kagetsu (No. 29), which does a killer tempura moriawase, and specialist – destinational, even – culinary spots are springing up like chanterelles.

One of the first to open, at the end of 2003, was Cipi Ripi (No. 200), Amsterdam’s first – and only – deli selling groceries from the former Yugoslavia. It’s the place t head when you want to knock up a Balkan fest at home. There are jars of Macedonian avjar, Serbian čvarci and prsute, with oblate for afters, all washed down with a bottle of Croatian Zlatan Plavac. (Cipi Ripi, by the way, also caters for appetites of a different kind: sporadically, a trestle table is set up outside, where you can flick through pre-owned porn videos. Go figure.)

Another place you’ll not find the likes of elsewhere is Buna Bet (No. 74), a slick-looking Ethiopian coffee shop (of the non-smoking kind), from the country where coffee was discovered. The stichting-run cafe opened in November, and is strictly fair trade; so fair, in fact, that they train women back home to work in the coffee industry as a way of helping them out of prostitution. Amd Meston, who works there, said they opened on Van Wou for the simple reason that it was a ‘good location’.

Eating options here are limited to sticky buns or a tosti, but if the things which transform ‘food’ into ‘dining’ are ritual, tradition, the gathering of people to talk, sharing and being served, then Buna Bet’s traditional coffee ceremony has these in abundance. For €4.50 a head, groups of six to 10 people can while away a couple of hours experiencing a fundamental of Ethipian culture.

Sitting on the floor, drinkers’ beans are roasted on a charcoal stove to release aroma, then crushed with a mortar and pestle. The ground coffee is transferred to a traditional clay pot, then sieved and brewed. When ready, the coffee is poured from a height and drunk black and sweet – very sweet. It’s considered rude to drink less that three cups and the last one – ‘Berekha’ – is blessed. Mesten says the ceremony is quite popular, with 15-20 people a month taking up the ultimate slow food experience. They also sell four varieties of coffee by the cup: Jimma, low-caffeine Yirga, Buna Melange – the house blend – and Harrar, which has a wine-like sharpness.

Talk of wine takes us to Van Woustraat’s most recent epicurean venture, Grape District (No. 54), which opened on 10 April. This wine merchant’s interior is styled along the lines of swankier eateries (think 15 and Herengracht), all exposed brick and bare concrete, with a striking rainbow-coloured sign, enticing enough to make even the strictest adherent of the temperance movement’s wagon wobble.

Grape District’s Joost Bockwinkel says they came to Van Woustraat because ‘the neighbourhood is changing. There are a lot of young people living in the surroundings. We have a very nice spot, a corner shop, so there are lots of people walking by, there’s good visibility. It’s a neighbourhood that connects with our philosophy and our concept.”

Even though the shop has only been open just over a week, it’s doing roaring trade. “It’s been above expectations actually,” says Bockwinkel. “There are lots of people coming in and looking around. Everybody has said it’s something new, a very nice, open shop, a new approach and they like the young appearance.”

There’s just one thing that Van Woustraat lacks – surprisingly, given the number of people who live there with backgrounds from the region – and that’s a really good Turkish restaurant. If you’re after an Ottoman-sized feast, then you’ll have t assemble one yourself from the Turkish grovers that line the street. Or there’s always those kebabs. If you do indulge, then Bockwinkel has this advice for maximising your shoarma’s potential: “The summer’s coming, so if you have a kebab you need wine that has the summer in it, but also has a bit of spice. You should drink one of our roses. I recommend a full-bodied rose called Castell d’Algars.”

Published in Amsterdam Weekly, 20-26 April 2006

(Except, perhaps, to be Max Hastings’ mother.)

Who wouldn’t turn to a reassuring drink like this in their hour of need? Is the Alcohol Doctor a Korean soft drink? No! Is it an iced tea? No! Is it an Alcohol Solution Drink 86 SYSTEM? Yes! The can also says – or, rather cruelly shouts, and it isn’t helping your 365-degree hangover one itsy bit – “WORLD CAMPAIGN for STRONG LIVER”. Well, there’s no disagreeing with that one. Who wants a wussy lily liver?

It contains, it says, 18 kinds of fruit and vegetable. They’re listed  on the back in a mocking 3 pt san serif font – nothing for your eyes to gain purchase on here, sunshine, you shoulda thougta THAT before the third nightcap – diospyros kaki Thunb var; persimmon extract; lyceum chinese mill; lycii fructose extract; buckwheat leaf; citrus slough; onion; taurine; glycine semen (!) germinatum; bean sprouts extract (what, water?); citric acid; vitamin C; fluid fructose; fruits flavor. Is that 18?

The couple on the front look happy enough, although it’s a worry that the woman is gripping her head. Perhaps she’s feeling a bit woozy because she hasn’t paid a visit to the Doctor yet. It’s not too late though. One can of Alcohol Doctor can be taken before or after drinking or in a feeling of fatigue.

I’m not sure if I eat terribly differently when I do it alone. I know that, of necessity, what with me being a news widow and all, I eat a lot of my meals on my Jack Jones. I don’t think that there’s a huge difference between what I do by myself and what I do in company. Last week, for example, I had a fairly elaborate stir-fry with deep-fried tofu and miso soup drunk from a bowl on the side. I had a burger with sweet potato wedges and home-made coleslaw. Tonight (tout seul again) I am having roast butternut squash with some black-eyed bean mushroom sauce thing. Not deliberately over-elaborate with candelabrum, polished silver and stiff linen like M. Blanc, then, but not an ascetic’s dinner either. I might experiment with stuff a bit more if it’s just me, but I definitely don’t shovel hunks of cheese or slabs of chocolate down my throat. Or rather: I do, but that’s as well as and not instead of.

I own a copy of Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter. Here it is:

It’s a 1963 Penguin, inscribed with the message “Oct-’77 To Martin from Mum with love.” (Nothing to do with me.) I used to own two copies, but gave the more recent one, with a cover like this, away.

Again, not sure where I acquired this volume, or the other one for that matter: probably Colchester (post-graduate with plenty of time on hands + not much money + surfeit of charity shops = fantastic second-hand book collection). I do remember very clearly, however, the first time I ever encountered this book. It would have been sometime around 1989, when I was at Oxford, and sharing a house with the scion of a minor branch of a major family. He had been given it as a gift and I read it avidly because, more than Entrance Exams and subfusc and boys from Eton and ivy-filled quadrangles and girls actually – actually! – called Cordelia, it gave me a clear insight into the ways of the middle classes, and made me realise they are quite different from us.

First of all, the acknowledgements credit Elizabeth David, which is a dead giveaway, because Britain is divided by the post-war cookery book: David, or Marguerite Patten. Will you be cooking courgette and herb risotto or mushroom-stuffed eggs when the revolution comes?

But this is a lovely book and I keep going back to read it and I think that Whitehorn is a wonderful writer and one hell of a woman. Give me this book any day over Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which took me ten years to finally get round to finishing. (There’ll be more of that another time.)

I love the cover. I like the way that this is “a Penguin Handbook”, a no-nonsense manual for getting stuff done. I like the way she encourages people to work with their limitations. I admire the way she encourages people to try new stuff – something that British people do very well, as anyone who’s ever tried to find miso or garam masala or jerk seasoning in a Northern European supermarket will realise. I love the way the book describes early Sixties bedsitland as vividly as anything in Muriel Spark or The L-Shaped Room. I adore looking at the strangeness of the dishes she describes, exotic in their old-fashionedness: tripe Catalan (tenpence worth, with tomato paste); curried macaroni; mutton rissoles; green pea sandwiches; coffee jelly. It is a time of “super-bread” and evaporated milk (not, you note, “evap”.)

This was a world that was alien to me, and which always will be to some extent. It was a world of dinner parties (still a novelty for me in ’89). A very U world indeed where “paper napkins” are only “socially O.K.” when handing round hotdogs. And this – this is the bit that has stuck in my mind after all these years – was a world where parents sent spies round to check on you. Whoah. Your parents deploying someone else to poke their nose into family affairs and see if you are behaving? Worse. Having your parents’ friends round to dinner? I still think that’s weird.

Although I love the way that Whitehorn writes, peppering the text with anecdote, illustration, literature, other cookery books, there’s something about the whole thing that scares me slightly, like having your tea round your teacher’s house.

Have I cooked anything from this book? No. And I’ve always wondered whether lots of people really did knock up Haddock Monte Carlo on a two-ring. And if they did, what did it really taste like?

This edition is from January 1969, from the New English Library. It’s a reprint of the original 1961 edition, which was published under the nom de plume Eliot George (get it?).

I think I bought this in the mid-1990s, when I was a student at Essex University, but I don’t remember exactly. Normally, I inscribe the date and the place I bought a book on the fly-leaf, but I haven’t with this one. It probably came from a charity shop, which Colchester was rich with at the time. I think I remember reading it, if not acquiring it, around the same time as Cruising by Gerald Walker, in which I also omitted to jot a time and place, but I see cost me 40p.

The covers a bit of an oddity, because there aren’t any biker babes in this book; in fact, women don’t feature large in it at all. It was probably issued under this cover to lure in a straight male audience (who may have been in for a bit of a surprise when they read it) and perhaps was cashing in on the cult appeal of the film The Girl on a Motorcycle, released the year before. By then, this book had already made it to the big screen,  with a Sixties Britflick cast that scores a perfect 10: Rita Tushingham, Dudley Sutton, Betty Marsden from Round the Horne, Mike Baldwin off Coronation Street, Dandy Nicholls.

Dick and Reggie are two 18 year olds who hang out at a bikers’ greasy spoon that is no doubt meant to evoke the Ace Cafe on the North Circular (and where, in fact, scenes from the film were recorded). Dick loves his nan and dressing sharp. Reggie loves his motorbike and hates his wife. Both boys end up loving each other.

They inhabit an era when young thugs said ‘smashing!’, Primrose Hill was a shabby backwater, a Perry Como haircut was a sign of youthful rebellion and the working classes began every aitch-word with an apostrophe, meaning the page ’as a ’orrible, ’ard-to-read look, as if someone ’oo ’as really shakey ’ands ’as scattered ’undreds and thousands over the ’ole page.

They aren’t wrong ’uns, really, Dick and Reggie. Rather, they are good boys who have fallen in with a bad crowd. They don’t like the violence but they have to do it because they are trapped by their own masculinity. Their whole existence fetishises machismo: the bond of the gang; the casual hatred of women; the tight leather clothes and throbbing machines between their legs. They love male things and societies of men but don’t know what to do with that love yet.

In the course of the story, they do over a church-hall dance and pour a pint of milk over the head of a vicar.

They do over a janitor’s shed just for fun.

They do over a newsagent’s for a share of the dosh.

They plan do over a picture house then run away and join the merchant navy. Go to Australia, get a new life together.

Freeman’s prose is clunky, workmanlike and with none of the verve or sass of American counterparts from the time, but it’s a nice enough little portrait of a world on the cusp of a big change. The working classes know their place, know they don’t like it and are bloody well about to change it through hire purchase and pop culture and holidays abroad.  It draws a neat comparison between parallel criminal underworlds – gangland and gays, explored to its fullest and best effect in the work of Jake Arnott - and how young men could and did drift between the two. It also dips its toes into the secret life of the merchant navy, with a cameo from the obligatory parade of shrieking pansies.

Women don’t come out of it well, though: they are thick and vain and nagging and avaricious, with insatiable sexual appetites. They will ultimately betray you. As a portrait of gayness it’s not too bad, capturing the thrill of first love as it flings you round like a switchback railway. It is mercifully free of handwringing and guilt – which perhaps made it endure longer than the other dimestore paperbacks that came out at the time – and there isn’t much furtiveness, which makes it a refreshing read. But the book can never let the reader forget this is the 1960s, when homosexuality was a problem and as such, needed a solution – still the case to some extent in representations today (look no further than Brokeback Mountain for an example of this). The solution, of course, had to be death for one of the young lovers. I’m not going to tell you which.

This piece of literary history is brought to you by Guthrie Road, Clifton, Bristol. It’s now retirement flats.

Hughenden Road, Horfield. Much nicer than that nasty bronze down on the waterfront.

‘Lesbian politics.’ Not so long ago, these two words were enough to make governments quake. After decades of suppression, the empowerment of the gay liberation movement from America, combined with an international surge of feminism, created the out, outspoken and sometimes outrageous figure of the militant lesbian. By the mid-1970s, everything, especially the personal, was politicised. You had women who chose the gay way as an explicit rejection of patriarchy, and self-sufficient, separatist communes sprang up, withdrawn from any male contact. There were lesbian-only publishers, record labels, language: ‘women’ became detached from any whiff of the male to become the satirists’ favourite, ‘wimmin’. It seemed for a while that a sometimes glorious, sometimes insane, but always entirely lesbian future was dawning. We had the power not just to change the world, but to be the world.

Fast-forward 20-odd years, and times have changed. Section 28 came and went, along with Greenham Common and its missiles. Aids needn’t be a death sentence. The spectre of the Loony Lefty Lezzie no longer haunts respectable society. In some ways, lesbians have become respectable society: we can get hitched (kind of); we can’t be sacked because of who we sleep with – though we don’t earn as much as our male colleagues; we can raise families, although some MPs still aren’t keen on fatherless children. Militancy doesn’t go down well in our own community any more, either. Look at the petition posted by ‘Angrylesbians’ on DIVA’s website against new film Lesbian Vampire Killers – because it is ‘demeaning to women, and lesbians in particular’. Less than 20 years ago, this would have prompted action — remember The Silence of the Lambs? Now it only attracts hoots of derision.

Lesbians’ own political attitudes are clearly becoming more mainstream. Does this mean that the mainstream is reciprocating by letting us into the corridors of power? Not exactly. Since Labour’s Angela Eagle came out publicly in 1997 – the only lesbian MP to do so since Maureen Colquhoun in 1976 – no-one has followed her example. So, how does it feel to be in such a unique position? ‘I don’t think too much about it,’ says Eagle. ‘It’s been more than 10 years now since I came out, and it’s just an aspect of the work I do. Although, obviously, I try to reflect those views at appropriate times, most recently the IVF vote. It’s a privilege to be able to represent that viewpoint.’

Although Eagle is the lone voice in Westminster, there is hope on the horizon, thanks to a new generation of politically engaged young dykes who link their thinking with their sexuality. One of these is 22-year-old aspiring Liberal Democrat Rachel Hamburger, founder of the Islington branch of Liberal Youth. For her, the connection was forged early on: ‘I remember being very young – before I’d started identifying as gay – and reading about Section 28. It immediately struck a chord with me and, as the Lib Dems were being very vocal on the Section, that really drew me in.’

Hamburger and Eagle both belong the traditionally gay-friendlier parties; perhaps one of the more eyebrow-raising recent developments is our being courted by the Tories, with party leader David Cameron speaking supportively of Civil Partnerships. This is unequivocally a giant leap for the party that, only 20 years ago, introduced Section 28 specifically to counteract ‘pretended family relationships’. Now the Conservatives are casting not just for the pink vote, but also for pink candidates, too. One of the most high profile is the party’s vice chair, Margot James, PPC for Stourbridge. She admits that her party’s LGBT record hasn’t been exemplary, and speaks of ‘the bad old days our party went through with introduction of Clause 28: that was really an attack on our way of life. Now we’re making great strides.’

Not everyone is convinced by the Conservatives’ new inclusive stance. Julia Brandreth is a 38-year-old trade unionist. She says, ‘More Tories than before seem to be falling over themselves to show their gay-friendly credentials. However, what is being courted is the (mainly white, gay male) pink pound. I’m not sure that working-class lesbians, white or black, are being courted by anyone’s political agenda.’ She doesn’t see a place for her beliefs in parliamentary politics. ‘I can’t see myself joining a mainstream political party in the near future,’ she explains. ‘I don’t think they represent the views and interests of anyone who isn’t rich and privileged. To me, the disaster of British politics at the moment is that the whole thing is set up to make people think that they can’t change what’s happening.’ For Brandreth, political engagement is more effective at grassroots level, and is evidence that, for those who feel frustrated with the mainstream, there is still space to get involved.

Although all these women occupy different points on the political spectrum, they all agree on one topic: role models. Or rather, their absence. ‘It’s shocking that we still only have one out lesbian MP!’ declares Brandreth. Since women were first allowed to stand for parliament in 1918, the total number of female MPs ever voted in wouldn’t even half-fill the Commons. Furthermore, according to recent research by the Electoral Reform Society, women occupy just 20% of the seats in Westminster, a proportion that hasn’t changed since 1997. At the rate we’re going, it would take around 400 years to achieve parity. And so few women naturally means even fewer lesbians.

‘There aren’t many lesbians in politics,’ says Hamburger ruefully. ‘And the influence of role models mustn’t be underestimated. It’s difficult when you can’t see anyone that’s like you [in politics]. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.’

In May, Iain Duncan Smith’s (unsuccessful) amendment to May’s IVF bill – which tried to make the ‘need for a father’ an obligation for artificially-conceived children – rammed home the message that role models aren’t just about setting a good example, but also about having a say in the way we’re allowed to live our lives. ‘On the floor of the chamber, lesbians were completely absent from the debate,’ says Hamburger. ‘It could have changed our rights to have children, yet there was not one gay woman who debated the issue from that standpoint. It really struck me just how absent lesbians are from mainstream politics. And what a shame that is.’
‘It’s important that the perspective gay women can bring to society gets properly represented,’ says Eagle, who brought her influence to bear during the run-up to the vote. ‘Behind the scenes, I did a lot of explaining to colleagues that lesbians would be denied treatment, and I didn’t think that was fair. My colleagues in the Labour Party realised that once they’d been able to talk it through with me.’

Visible lesbian politicians can also incite more women to get up and do the same,  and it’s telling that even these politically engaged women don’t mention other lesbians as their inspirations. In fact, only James mentioned Maureen Colquhoun, and then as a cautionary tale – her political career was effectively ruined by the media and her own Labour Party, which offered little support – rather than as a figure to be emulated. Thirty years down the line, can lesbians expect better reception? Hamburger, a part of the generation that has reaped the benefits of legislative and societal shifts, says she’s never encountered homophobia. ‘My experience has been wholly positive from beginning to end. You have to be open about it from the beginning, though, which isn’t easy for everyone. I announced to my mother that if I go anywhere in politics, [my sexuality] will be out there. I’m lucky, because I haven’t had any problems with my family.’

Even the most visible lesbian has a generally positive experience. ‘I don’t think I have experienced homophobia face to face in Parliament,’ says Eagle. ‘I’ve had a few incidents in the constituency – you come across people who aren’t happy with it, or who comment, but actually the response I’ve had gives me a great deal of confidence in people’s general good sense.’ Margot James agrees. ‘I don’t feel there are any issues in the Conservative Party – I feel no sense of any problems.’ Where these two high-profile lesbians do see a bigger problem is from the media. Eagle says, ‘The way the media talk about it sometimes can be a bit irrelevant.’ James expands on that: ‘You get the odd hostile interview. Letters in my local newspaper suggested that, because of my sexuality, I’m not able to advance Cameron’s family agenda.’

In the unions, Brandreth says she sometimes comes up against stereotyped expectations. ‘Sad to say, people often still expect a trade union official to be white, male and straight,’ she says. ‘People are often surprised when I turn up!’ But she is very aware that one point of politics is to change attitudes – on all sides. ‘I think what’s great about the trade union movement is that you meet and bond with people at work who you’d never meet any other way. This changes your and other people’s perceptions.’

The other job of politics is, of course, to make the future a better place than today. And these women, although of very different shades of opinion, all agree that the way forward no longer involves single-issue campaigning, now that the major discriminatory hurdles have been vaulted. The future of lesbian politics will be more – that word again – mainstream. ‘I think that 90% of the issues facing gay women are facing all women,’ says James, ‘And probably 70% of those issues face all people.’

For Brandreth, what’s needed now is a drive towards addressing subtler forms of discrimination against lesbians. ‘A big issue is pay disparity between men and women, which obviously has a disproportionate effect on lesbian couples,’ she explains. ‘It impacts on the larger question of whether legislation, of itself, solves problems. The Equal Pay act was passed in 1970, and yet statistics show that, nearly 40 years later, women’s pay is 80% that of men’s.’ Which, of course, is where the unions come in.

In the period that covers the average life expectancy of a woman in the UK, we have made the journey from being allowed to mark an ‘X’ in a box to fielding out-lesbian candidates. But until we have equal wages, until homophobic bullying in schools has gone, until our parenting skills aren’t under fire, until we stop using the word ‘pioneering’ about women like Eagle, we still have a long way to go. The next generation of lesbian politicians is optimistic about the future of lesbian politics. ‘Perhaps,’ says Hamburger, ‘the first lesbian Prime Minister is just a few years away. Think about the leaps we’ve made in the last decade; if they happen over the next two decades, there’s a chance of it… I’m not naive – I think it’s a possibility.’