Twice as Nice

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Seconds anyone? I’ll have some, thanks!

In my experience most things are better the second time around.

Don’t you think left over curry is tastier than freshly-cooked? Overnight, the meat soaks up all the flavours that were swirling around in that extra bucketful of water you’d tipped in accidentally, and in the morning it’s fit for a banquet!

If you’re on your own that morning and can’t be bothered to make breakfast for one, you take a dollop of curry from the fridge to have cold with slices of untoasted bread. Some would call you bone lazy but I’d say you were a comfort food connoisseur, because there’s nothing quite like cold curry and pauruti as you slope around the house in your pyjamas on a rainy morning.

It’s not just food that’s better the second time around, stories can improve with retelling too.

I find that especially true of those classic films your parents made you watch as a kid. ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Mary Poppins’, ‘Hatari’ and ‘Ben Hur’ were excruciatingly boring and embarrassingly naff when made to sit through them as a ten year old with every young cousin that your family could dredge up shackled together in front of the TV like some juvenile chain gang.

OK, we weren’t really chained together but they had their beady eye on us throughout and squirmers and whingers were promptly put in their place so everyone could enjoy the wholesome entertainment.

Of course, you could watch ‘Ben Hur’ any number of times and it wouldn’t improve but many old movies do. Having sought some of them out as an adult, I’ve fallen in love with black and white beauties like ‘Roman Holiday’ and ‘Spellbound’ (‘course it’s got nothing to do with the fine figure of a man that was Gregory Peck)!

As for books, I have neither the patience nor time these days to plough through pages hoping damp squibs liven up, unless they grip me from the start. But on the few occasions I have returned to a book I have found it rewarding.

I have always loved Sting’s eclectic music and environmental zeal and so when my husband took me to the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales two years ago to watch him holding forth on his new book, I expected a very different person from the arrogant and self-absorbed man we saw. Presented with his book ‘Broken Music’ thereafter, I found I could not get into it. I laboured through the first chapter and put it away.

Two years later with the memory of his airs at the festival fading, I picked it up again and found it totally absorbing. The man was certainly no saint but the book is beautifully written and redolent with the sights and sounds of the North of England in the 60’s and 70’s.

Of course, there are many books like that, tomes you put aside to go back to with a clear head (think James Joyce), and the same is true of people.

I am invariably wrong about men the first time I meet them, so I have schooled myself not to be taken in by first impressions. Dazzlers are often dastardly, and the callow or taciturn can reveal themselves to be youthful, intelligent and entertaining.

I am, indeed, thinking of my husband. He is my second husband because second marriages like so many other things are better than the first!

By then you’ve already been ‘round the block, and know that there are very few princes lurking beneath the warty exterior of the frogs you are meant to kiss. Then out of the blue, in a mouldy meeting room, it happens; your eyes meet across the doodles of monsters, monkeys and deliberately misshapen colleagues on your respective notepads. It is not the fairytale setting of your adolescent dreams, and he is not Rhett Butler (Thank the Lawwd, as GWTW’s Mamie would have said).

He will never sweep me into a seductive Fandango or emerge from a lake in a sodden shirt clinging to his pumped-up pecs. He won’t lay his dashingly cut cape down over puddles for me to walk across unsullied.

And that could be because he’s not a fictional character, the kind you no longer want because you’ve grown up. What he does do means so much more; he wraps me in his coat lovingly when I’m cold, he looks after me tenderly when I’m ill, he makes me laugh my blues away and takes the weight of the world off my shoulders every time I need a break.

Of course, as with all second helpings, great things are made better by their unexpected appearance.

Last time I was in such a tearing hurry to board the very first bus that came along that I didn’t even check the destination. This time, I wasn’t even at the bus stop; I was mooching along, stopping to smell the flowers, when that nifty little number pulled up beside me and asked if I wanted a ride.

I said sure Mister, join me on my ramble while I get the measure of you, because I am older and wiser and know what I want. And on our stroll through the next few years, I discovered that he not only talked the talk, but also walked the walk, and so we walked all the way up the aisle.

How about it then? It’s all very well to be once bitten twice shy, but when you are ready to live a little, treat yourself to seconds, they are usually twice as nice!