RIVERSIDE SPECIAL

One of the things that kept me alive when I was a student was a meal that used to be known as a “Riverside Special” which used to be served at the “Riverside Tavern” which was the pub just across the road from the Art School building where I spent at least part of my days for three years, especially after the Institution I was attending instigated a mandatory daily signing-in policy which was probably the final nail in the coffin of the laissez-faire attitude to Art Schools from the 1950s and 1960s and which probably consigned all future generations of free thinking creatives to have to spend their lives being office workers after all.

Those politicians of the 1980s, eh…? They’ve given us so much to be “grateful” for…

Of course, this was in the days when students like me could still afford to eat, and not only that, eat reasonably well, in actual eateries where “real” people ate, if, that is, you were careful in what you chose from the menu. We did, after all, still have things like “grants” in those days, which, if you were canny enough, there was still a vague chance you could actually keep alive on.

Choosing to eat across the road at the pub was mostly done in order to escape from the dubious culinary delights of the canteen run by the enigmatic “Reg” whose canteen was very unlike the refectories on other campuses about the town as he seemed rather averse to producing any food that seemed remotely edible. Even his tea seemed rather suspect, to be honest, with a filmy surface that seemed to dance around with a multitude of oily colours which excited a lot of the students of “Fine Arts” to almost the same degree (if you’ll pardon the pun) as it disgusted me.

I still drank an awful lot of it, though.

Mind you, come to think of it, those “Fine Arts” students didn’t seem to mind his food all that much either, judging by the way they used to queue up for it and wolf it down, so maybe that tells you an awful lot about the “abstract” minds of the fine artist as opposed to the more “concrete” thinking of the graphic designers, if you want to believe in that sort of thing.

Actually, there might be something in that…

Damn! I wish that I’d known about things like “Oxbridge” back then and that it would have been perfectly acceptable to study something like English. Not that I’d have got in, of course, but it would have been nice to know that I could have tried…

I was reminded of all this recently when I had already eaten the ham sandwich I had made for my lunch and one of m’colleagues suggested that they might go off to the chippy to get their own lunch. A “Riverside Special” was precisely that combination; A Ham Muffin with chips, for less than two quid (although adding a beer tended to price it up a bit), and the memory and the taste of that particular combination came flooding back. Incidentally, a “Tavern Special” (do you see what they did with the name there…?) replaced the ham with a sausage for exactly the same price, and was much more welcome on chilly days.

Ah yes, the “Riverside Tavern”, where I also learned to combine lager and cider into a frothy mess that no-one else would touch; where you could get an orange-coloured drink known as a “Purple Nasty” because of the colour it became when it returned later on; where I first encountered the “Depth Charge” a drink within a drink; and where a girl once apparently did something quite dreadful after she borrowed my thin white tie, and, although I did get the tie back, nobody ever told me what it was that she had done...

Another mealtime favourite was a ham and cheese toastie from “Brown’s”, a coffee shop which, despite it being a bit of a trek in comparison,  I used frequent with some of my very good friends when we wanted to escape from the hurly burly of Art School life.

Those windows wouldn’t look through themselves, you know…

Everyone I knew back then seemed to have eating habits that could be considered very peculiar in one way or another, I recall. Those of us living on campus used to get our breakfast thrown in with the cost of the rent, and more than one of m’fellows used to pile up as much as they could at that point of the day and basically live off that for twenty-four hours. There was definitely one chap who lived off that option, supplemented by cereals for his other meals if he got hungry, for the entire three years.

Three years of basically just eating breakfast…

I suppose he’ll have to spend his fifties eating desserts.

Another acquaintance had a three-weekly cycle of meals that cost him just over a pound a week, and he always ended each term with a full bank balance and was therefore able to go out and buy guitars and LPs and suchlike. He would go to the market and buy a bag of potatoes that cost about 20p, and four days worth of either faggots, fish cakes or pasties, all of which could be got in quantities of “four for a pound”.

It’s strange how what you expect from your food, as well as your actual taste, changes with the years. Back in those days, I hadn’t yet had my eyes opened to much beyond the limitations of what my mother had served up, so even curries and pizzas were a bit of an exotic unknown to me then.

Nowadays, my horizons (as well as my waistline) seem far broader, but I couldn’t half go one of those “Riverside Specials” right now.