Homesick Truckie in the Algarve Dreams of Bacon

by Gaia Holmes (Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed, Comma Press)

The sun bares its golden chest,
makes the palm trees flirt and sizzle.
Green sap simmers, resin fizzes
and he dreams of bacon.

Days basting on the silver sands
and he’s transformed, his lardy pallor
turns from raw prawn to copper god,
his eyes shine with the sweetness
of mangoes, sienna skinned women
wink with their hips, click castanet lips
and he dreams of bacon.

The sunsets are the colour of Sangria.
The petrol demons leave his lungs,
he breathes tangy ocean air,
feels the brine scour his veins
and he dreams of bacon.

He dreams of bacon;
squidged between white bread
so soft and moist it holds
his fingerprints like a plaster cast,
bacon, drenched in a pornography
of lewd ketchup and yellow fat.

He dreams of eating
crispy, streaky bacon butties
in Anne’s Motorway Café
as he watches the juggernauts
waddle by and fade into
a grim backlash of sour British rain.

A poem for truckers and bacon-lovers everywhere. When I began this column I wrote that I believed there was poetry for everyone – including a truck driver on the M1. Poems that strike a chord with us are often (although not always) about someone like us, or some aspect of life that is familiar to us, so I imagined that a Times-reading truck driver (it’s not impossible, is it?) might find relevance in any number of the poems that have graced this page. But here is a poem that might even be about one of them.

When the “sun bares its golden chest” the heat is so powerful that the “resin fizzes” in the palm trees, and the truck driver’s “dreams of bacon” are reflected in words that describe aspects of frying food as the sun turns the Algarve into a grill tray.

The truckie too, is being cooked; “basting on the silver sands” he’s turned from a lardy, white lump to a “copper god”. I imagine him lying there thinking “What am I doing? I get out here two weeks a year for a holiday, toast my epidermis among a whole pile of other English people, fry my brains, then go home again and it’s as if it never happened . . . oh, what I wouldn’t give for the comfort of my truck, a copy of The Times, a mug of tea with three sugars in it and a bacon buttie.”

The trouble with sunbathing is that we have plenty of time to think about what we would rather be doing. And while a tan can be very fetching if one doesn’t mind the occasional melanoma in later life, the colour wears off in about the same length of time that it took to acquire the tan, usually two weeks or so. Of course, you could stop washing and keep it for longer, but then it would be hard to tell where the tan ended and the ingrained grime began.

Once brown, however, there’s no denying that we look better; a bit of colour suits most of us, and being very white is often considered to represent a somewhat unhealthy lifestyle – perhaps driving a truck. Of course, it wasn’t always so; our ancestors favoured white skin, brown skin being associated with the menial labourer who was out in all weathers. Apparently, in the reign of Elizabeth I, white lead and vinegar would be employed to affect a truly deathly pallor, and of course, over a period of time it was actually deadly. But that was in the days when washing one’s face in mercury was sometimes used as a form of do-it-yourself facial peel. Perhaps this is why the EU seeks to ban the use of mercury in thermometers, barometers, diffusion pumps and the like; they think that those of us who eschew the red-hot roast of the Algarve might decide that a little mercury-chic would be better suited to our delicate complexions. We might make ourselves a face-mask out of the minute amounts of mercury from as many thermometers as we can lay our hands on, in order to watch our faces drop off.

Back to bacon butties. Our truckie’s eyes shine “with the sweetness of mangoes” as if he’s been living on them, but still he dreams of bacon. And the “sienna skinned women” hold no attraction for him; I think of their hips winking with an undulation that is sometimes unmistakable when women walk, and if that isn’t something to take a man’s mind off bacon butties, I don’t know what is. But this truck driver isn’t so easily won over. He’s too homesick for his everyday life, in which bacon butties are a main feature. Even the women’s “castanet lips” that click, as if demanding his attention with their flirtatious flamenco overtones, fail to divert him.

Basking beneath the orange red of sangria sunsets, the truckie breathes clean, bracing sea air, but his mind remains elsewhere. If our heart is heavy with longing then it is almost impossible to enjoy our surroundings, no matter how lovely. Holmes describes the truckie’s dream to us; the bacon buttie with its soft, white bread and “pornography/ of lewd ketchup and yellow fat”. The artery-clogging mixture of bacon, fat, bread, butter and tomato ketchup is described in a lascivious way, because that is where our truck driver’s passions lie.

Our truckie doesn’t care that while eating bacon butties from Anne’s Motorway Café the only view is of other trucks that “waddle by” and the “grim backlash of sour British rain”. He would give up the sun-soaked Algarve for that view in a moment, because that is where his heart lies; between two slices of bread with fried streaky bacon, watching the foul weather that is so comfortingly familiar.

But all things must end, so our truckie will be home again soon and his holiday will be forgotten. He will, however, be reunited with the object of his desire. I must now leave you for the fridge, where I know there is bacon.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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