A Gift from the Comfort Food Café: Celebrate Christmas in the cosy village of Budbury with the most heartwarming read of 2018!. Debbie Johnson
like a ribbon, lined with a few shops and a pub, a community centre and a pet cemetery and a couple of dozen little houses. They’re quite old, and face straight into the pavement, and were probably built for fishermen in ye olde days of yore.
Several of my friends – regulars at the Comfort Food Café, a few minutes’ walk away on the clifftops – live on the same road. I used to feel a bit claustrophobic, living so close to people who were keen to be friends. I used to feel like the only way I could be independent and safe was to be alone. Sometimes, I still feel like that – but I try to beat it down with a big stick, because it’s really not healthy, is it?
So, I know from my horribly early visit to the bathroom, in the grey pre-dawn November light, roughly what else they’re all up to. Edie May, who is 92 and has almost as much energy as Saul, is still tucked up in bed, bless her.
Zoe and Cal, along with Cal’s daughter Martha, also still seem to be a-slumber. Martha’s 17, and from what I recall from that state of being, mornings are not to be touched at weekends. Lucky swines.
In fact, I can see lights on in only one other house – the one where Becca and Sam live. They have a baby girl – Little Edie – who has just turned one. She’s utterly adorable and they both dote on her – but she’s not one of life’s sleepers.
Seeing them awake, and imagining Sam bleary-eyed and zombified as he tries to entertain Little Edie, makes me feel slightly better. There’s no snooze button on a baby – he’ll be up, and surrounded by plastic objects in primary colours, and elbow-deep in nappies. Ha ha.
Saul doesn’t have a snooze button either – but he is easier to distract. This morning, by 6 a.m., I am not only in corpse pose – I am playing Beauty Parlour.
This is one of Saul’s favourite games, and I have no idea where he picked it up. None of the women in Budbury are exactly dedicated followers of fashion.
Willow, one of Lynnie’s daughters, has a pretty unique style that involves a lot of home-made clothes and a nose ring and bright pink hair. The teenagers – Martha and her pal Lizzie – definitely wear a lot of eyeliner. But there isn’t a beauty parlour in the village – or possibly even in the twenty-first century. Even the words sound like something from the 1950s, and bring to mind those big space-alien dryers women sit beneath in old movies, before they go on a hot date with Cary Grant.
Anyway – I don’t know where he got it from, but I’m glad he did. It’s a game that can be played with me entirely immobile. The very best kind of game.
He’s gathered my make-up bag and a collection of hairbrushes and slides and bobbles; even some hairspray and perfume. In all honesty, I rarely even use any of it, but like most women I’ve somehow managed to amass a gigantic pile of half-used cosmetics and hair products to clutter up the house for no good reason.
He’s sitting cross-legged next to me, blond hair scrunched up on one side and perfectly flat on the other, working away with the foundation. I didn’t know I even owned foundation, and I suspect it’s some deep tan-coloured gunk I used after a sunny holiday in Majorca when I was twenty-one. He’s blending it in with all the gentleness of Mike Tyson, but I don’t care.
It’s allowing me to stay in bed, so I just make the odd encouraging noise, and keep my eyes closed really tight when he starts on the eyeshadow. I ban him from mascara though, as I’d actually like to keep my vision.
‘You’re looking so beautiful, Mummy,’ he says, when he pauses to inspect his work so far. ‘But I think you need to highlight your cheekbones a bit more. I’ll use some blusher.’
‘Okay,’ I mutter, half asleep. Where is he getting this stuff?
I hear the lids getting screwed off various pots, and know from his sharp inhalation of breath that he’s probably just spilled something. In fact, the whole duvet cover will likely be covered in powders and lotions – but hey, that’s what washing machines were made for, right?
He pokes at me with his fingers, rubbing in what I know will be two great big clown-like spots on the side of my face, before sighing in satisfaction. Lipstick is next, after he’s instructed me to make a ‘kissy mouth’ first. I bet I’m looking really sexy.
I glance through slitted eyes at the clock, and see that it is now 6.20 a.m. Wow. A massive lie-in.
‘How’s it going?’ I ask, stifling a yawn.
‘Really good. Really pretty. I think I might be finished. Shall we get up so we can watch cartoons before we go to the café for breakfast?’
Ugggh. Cartoons. I shrivel and die a little inside, and make a new suggestion: ‘Hey – why don’t you go and get my nail varnishes and you can do my fingers and toes?’
That fills in the next half an hour, and completely finishes off the duvet cover. I must admit he does a quite good job though, and am still admiring my brand-new multi-coloured fingers a little while later, when he is safely installed on the sofa watching shows on CBBC, shoving chunks of sliced-up banana into his mouth and laughing at the antics of a cartoon mouse who goes to school.
I put the duvet cover in the washer, and change it out for a new one – it’s getting colder now anyway, and I’m already looking forward to snuggling up beneath the clean brushed cotton later. I live a wild and crazy life, what can I say?
I catch up on a bit of coursework for college – I’m trying to keep my nursing skills up to date, and since I met Lynnie, I’ve become a lot more interested in community mental health – and organise some files. I do some ironing, in a vain attempt to get prepared for the week ahead, and I check my emails. Apart from being contacted by a Nigerian prince offering me an unbeatable investment opportunity, there’s nothing.
My phone shows three missed calls from my mum, but I can’t quite face that conversation just yet. It’s never fun, getting Mum’s weekly updates on what terrible crime Dad has committed recently. I love them both, but it’s like being trapped between two angry pit bulls. Except with more spite and slobber.
I intermittently check in with Saul, making sure he’s not eating the coffee table or swinging from the light fittings, and eventually take him upstairs to get ready for the day ahead. He’s excited to go to the café, and I can’t say that I blame him – it’s become like a second home to us. A home that always has cake.
It’s his favourite place in the whole world. I think it might just be mine too.
The Comfort Food Café is like no place else on earth. It’s set on the top of a cliff on the gorgeous coastline, surrounded by the sea on one side and rolling green hills on the other.
You reach it by climbing up a long and winding path, and enter through a wrought-iron archway that spells out its name in an embroidery made of metal roses. Even the archway is pretty and welcoming.
The building itself is low and sprawling, and set in its own higgledy-piggledy garden. There are tables and benches that get packed in summer, as well as a barbecue area, a terrace, and as of this year, the adjoining Comfort Reads bookshop.
The bookshop is open by the time we get there, and Zoe – short, ginger, slim – waves at us through the window. She’s sitting on her stool behind the till, a paperback propped up on her knees. Saul squeaks when he sees her, as the last time we were here she produced a Gruffalo mug for him.
Zoe moved here last year with her god-daughter Martha, who is seventeen now, after her mother died. It’s not been an easy ride for them, but they’re settled now – along with Cal, Martha’s biological dad, who she’d never even met before last Christmas as he lived in Australia. Yeah, I know – if Budbury had a Facebook page, it would need to set its relationship status to ‘It’s Complicated’.
I don’t think anyone here is simple, or straightforward, or has had an especially traditional life. It’s