The Greasy Spoon

Stephen Braiden

You know how it is, you always find things when you're not looking for them. I was sorting through some old books recently, in a half-hearted way, when I came across a dog-eared and greasy Indian cookbook. I leafed through it's pages wondering whether it was worth keeping, until, stuck between a recipe for onion bhaji and "what to do with Ladies fingers", I found a photograph.

It was a small picture, taken on a cheap camera. A colour photograph, but the colours were varying shades of brown and grey which gave it the quality of a sepia print. There were two people by a roadside, a man and a woman. I recognized them immediately, it was Tom and Brigid and they looked terrible. It wasn't just the quality of the photograph, they really looked rough, even Brigid. They were leaning and reaching across the road as if getting to the other side was their ultimate goal in life, which, I guess, at the time it was. Both of them were laughing kind of manically. Next to them was a hand painted sign, huge and imposing, with a big arrow pointing across the road. It said, in big, unequivocal letters;

It all came flooding back, what a breakfast that was! A special breakfast, a breakfast unlike any other. It wasn't just the food, although that was great. No, what made this such a breakfast to remember were the circumstances. It was what led up to it, it was the whole story. I sat down and the images came pouring into my head. A red Datsun stuffed to the roof, a unicycle, garlic, mountainsides, pints of Guinness lined up on a bar, a walking stick, a Gypsy Kings tape and a woman with hair greasier than the sausages and rashers she was serving. That was our breakfast at the Greasy Spoon but the story starts with Cheryl.

Braiden, Stephen. The Greasy Spoon . Wiebers Verlag. Kindle-Version.

STEPHEN BRAIDEN (b.1961)

Has worked as a social worker, cycle dispatcher, English teacher, hospital porter, adventure playground worker, actor and dj. He was a songwriter and guitarist in various best forgotten bands in the early eighties and wrote and produced the album 'Until You Get Dizzy' by The Tea Leaf Family. He now lives and works in Berlin.

´The Greasy Spoon` is his first novel.

Available as PDF-, eBook- or Kindle-file
Published in 2013

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