sunday times column week four

Pirates, Paris and Two Bunch Palms

Thursday I took my kids to see Pirates 3 Dead Man’s Chest. Afterwards my 12 year old daughter came out of the bathroom with a look of barely contained excitement on her face. “Oh my God, dad!” I thought she had just found some money but it turned out that she had just seen Paris Hilton washing her hands in the cludgie next to her.

It might be no bad thing that Paris gets used to crowded toilet facilities and sharing with other girls as on Tuesday she begins a prison sentence for driving on a license after it was suspended for drunk driving.

At the weekend we managed to arrange some child care and spent the weekend at a spa in the desolate town of Desert Hot Springs about two and half hours drive into the desert from West Hollywood.

The spa is called Two Bunch Palms and is on a sacred Indian site. It is famous for its natural hot springs and mud baths, it features as the movie executive’s retreat in the Robert Altman movie The Player. It was once a clandestine hideaway for Al Capone who built a stone fortress there as his hideout from the Feds. They have his bullet proof car on display there.
I went for a run in the desert and saw a coyote, it looks like a skinny dog whose head is too big, not unlike the one in the cartoon.
I thought back to the family holidays we went on as kids. We either went to Ireland or to the West coast of Scotland in our green Morris Oxford, a car with a fold down leather arm rest in the back seat and bright orange pop up indicators.
It was mostly Girvan, for the Glasgow fair fortnight, I have a photo of us sitting in deck chairs, the only family on that beach next to what looks to be an active sewage pipe, on a day when an Eskimo would not venture outdoors for fear of frostbite.
My father sits smiling at us across the years, the only one whose teeth are not chittering, although mind you those teeth are not his, as he lost his in his youth in Ireland playing Hurling, which is somewhere between a contact sport and a martial art.
When he thought that it was time for us to get into the sea, he’d would tell us “Put on your costume” to the occasional surprise of any nearby listeners who might expect some kind of theatrical performance.
Our swimming costumes, maroon coloured and tweedy, were of dubious provenance, possibly hand knitted by some sadistic aunt. They were made of some kind of synthesis of a man made fabric and steel wool.
One of their unique features was that whenever they came into contact with any type of moisture they immediately doubled in weight and size. When I came out of the sea in them I looked like I was wearing a blood red overfull nappy which hung around my knees. Swimming in them was like swimming in leg irons.
If they weren’t hand knitted then they were no doubt purchased at Mrs Murphy’s, a second hand shop next to Paddy’s market in the Gallowgate in the east end of Glasgow. We kids were issued with strict instructions not to tell anyone that our clothes were bought in a second hand store and if the Rutherglen bus passed as my mother was on her way in there, she would dive up a close to avoid being spotted going in there.
At my father’s funeral, Mrs Murphy stood outside the chapel to pay her last respects to my dad. As I carried the coffin to the hearse I passed right by her, “Lovely man that Mr McGrade,” she said sadly,” size ten in a shoe” I couldn’t tell whether she was mourning the loss of a friend or his custom.
Another memorable Scottish holiday was the year we somehow managed to end up renting the lower half of a scruffy council house in Girvan. It rained so long and hard that if we had stayed there any longer we would have had to start building an ark.
It was torture for us as there was no TV downstairs but we could hear the one that was on upstairs, for four kids it was the equivalent of starving to death while living above a bakery.
I have a vivid memory of the one high point of the holiday which was watching the cross eyed boy who lived next door slowly dissect a golf ball with a fork. The first layer under the skin a bunch of elastics, then inside that a gooey substance that looked like what you find inside a chocolate éclair. You won’t see that in your Scottish Tourist Board Ads at the cinema.