Fifty shades of Roy

My Grandad or "Poppa Roy" as he was known to his friends was the patron saint of pork pies! He was a big gentle giant of a man who had the most beautiful twinkly eyes as bright as polished Whitby jet. He wasn`t very old when he died but his life had been full of kind deeds and the legacy he left us all was Love. Whenever we are going to the supermarket we say out loud "find us a parking spot Poppa Roy" and he always does.
He had huge hands and a huge heart, a weak one unfortunately for us all. Whenever I saw him he was rattling the tins in the pantry looking for lemon curd tarts or rock buns. He only ate brown bread which my Grandma made for him most days. Like me his idea of Heaven was a walk along Filey beach and Fish and Chips from Browns chippy or a fresh crab from a pretty girl on the sea front.
In the war he was in the RAF and his plane crashed. He was burned and invalided out of the service and became a local Bobby.In his later years he was a social worker , placing children into loving homes. That was his forte -as any child lucky enough to be in his family certainly knew the meaning of a loving home. When I had to sit my cycling proficiency he bought me a new Dawes bicycle, when a boy had broken my heart he helped mend it by telling me he wasn`t the man for the job anyway. I can remember sunny afternoons in his beautiful garden eating ham sandwiches and drinking tea. When we were little we used to race to clamber into bed with him and Gaggy in the mornings. He would open his bedroom window and feed the birds with crumbled biscuits, they were so tame they would fly into his room for their breakfast too or perch on his shoulder in the living room whilst he was watching the test match. What a sweetheart he was , a man capableof charming the birds from the trees.
You get eternal life through your children, the sparkling eyes look up at me from under a blonde mop of hair every breakfast in the face of my little boy Jimmy. Like his grandfather he won the cup at school for his sporting prowess and has a fondness for one of each and pork pies. Although they never met it is so comforting to talk about my grandfather, funnily he spent his Summers in the Lakes like us, his granny had a house on Windermere and another at Ulverston. So when we are there , we really are walking in the footsteps of a giant.

Yorkshire Parkin
If Yorkshire had entered the Olympics as a country in its own right it would have had more medals than south Africa! Eee I`m proud to be a Yorkshire terrier forever...


1lb oatmeal
4oz plain flour
8oz sugar
2tsp ground ginger
4oz melted butter
300g treacle
9 floz milk
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 beaten egg
2 nuggets of ginger in syrup sliced.

Mix all the dry ingredients then add the melted butter and black treacle, crystallised ginger , egg and milk. Pour into a lined tin.Pop into a gas mark 2 oven for 1  3/4 hours. This improves and goes all chewy and clarty if you leave it in a tin for two days. In Yorkshire we would have a slice of this with some Wensleydale cheese- yes really.

As my Poppa Roy would say "Cake without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze!" Fifty shades of Roy eh... he would think the World had gone mad if he could see everyone on mobiles (talking to themselves) , a smoking ban just about everywhere and respectable young girlies like myself swapping PD James for E L James!!