‘I’m cheating on you’: Frances Whiting’s column confession

Columnist Frances Whiting has confessed to her double life in journalism.

A ‘proper jaffle, from a jaffle iron and hot enough to rip the tastebuds off your tongue’.

Look, there’s no getting around this: I’m cheating on you. There is another column in my life, and it’s been going on for some time, right under your noses. How long, I hear you cry? Twenty-seven years, so really, it’s not like there weren’t signs.

It’s in our Sunday papers, and some of you will have read it, and some of you won’t, including a man called Robert.

Now Robert – possibly not his real name, which is Duncan – recently heard me speaking on the radio about a column I had written on the Reminiscence Bump.

Only Robert/Duncan/Sherlock Holmes hadn’t read it and sent me an email demanding to know why.

“I have not seen this, Frances,” he wrote. “Where did it appear?’’

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Well, it was in the aforementioned Sunday column, and it was about the tendency for people over 40 to romanticise the events, experiences, people and places of our teen years and 20s.

That’s the Reminiscence Bump, and it’s particularly pertinent to the music we all danced to before the ugly lights came on in the nightclub. Yes, it seems that we collectively believe that the sounds of our youth represent the best music of all time. Which obviously means The Clash, and I will fight you.

But here’s the thing, since I wrote that column, it has come to my attention that there is perhaps something that lingers even longer than music in our Reminiscence Bump, and that, my friends, is food.

I once knew a man who strode through the financial district of London like a Gladiator, a man who struck fear into the hearts of business rivals, a man who could make or break a multimillion- dollar deal with a lift of an eyebrow, and a man who wept at the thought of his mother’s curried egg sandwiches.

I myself would pretty much commit any one of the non-life in prison crimes to get my hands just one more time on one of those gigantic cream buns from my high school tuckshop. They were like doorstops, and they had some sort of cream on top that was clearly fake but it didn’t matter because they were delicious. And a very thin, wriggly strip of bright red, fake jam as well.

I have not tasted anything remotely as glorious since.

Portrait of Frances Whiting. Picture: David Kelly

When I asked my husband what his Reminiscence Bump was, he did not blink. Instead, he uttered three words. “Savoury Mince Jaffle.”

Now, the key word here is apparently “jaffle”. “Not a toastie,” he said, “from some sort of rubbish sandwich press,” but a “proper jaffle, from a jaffle iron and hot enough to rip the tastebuds off your tongue.”

Look, each to their own – and my friend Mandy’s own favourite from her Reminiscence Bump era is her mother’s tuna pasta bake, which she says was layers of macaroni noodles, oodles of cream, several cans of tuna and melted Kraft cheddar cheese throughout. She said it tasted like heaven, but her husband Ryan, who dated her in her early 20s, later whispered to me that it tasted like cat food.

Anyway, please send me in your Reminiscence Bump dishes – I’m willing to bet at least one of you is going to say Sizzler Cheese Toast.