Chittery bites, Troon Swimming Pool and vending machine glories

The best soup came out of the Troon Swimming Pool vending machine, all salt, fat, flour, onion powder and, though we wouldn’t have known it then, monosodium glutamate. It was scalding hot and went a little way towards reducing the hypothermic shivers induced by compulsory swimming lessons in that open-air, unheated saltwater monstrosity, which sprawled along the shoreline in decaying deco grandeur.

May. Early May in the west of Scotland, and that 1960s water was so cold it hurt. Especially on a Tuesday, the day after a Monday emptying, scouring and refill from the Firth of Clyde. We would learn, as we grew confident in our water skills, to aim for the Saturday or Sunday when a few days of summer crowds, sweating and urinating, turned the water algal green and relatively warm. But school swimming happened on a Tuesday, weather irrelevant, and the soup was an after-immersion lifesaver.

If we ever swam in the actual sea (always good fun jumping off the main sewage pipe), mum would provide what she called a chittery bite – a biscuit or piece of cake. But that vicious, plastic-cupped machine soup was somehow the real provider of inner warmth. The brew that was true. There was hot chocolate and something that pretended to be coffee, too, but it all came out of the same dispenser and even the sweet drinks tasted of salt. Not that much different from the swimming pool water on a Saturday.

At home, soups were home-made (vegetable broth, lentil) and tinned tomato, always Heinz. Heinz Tomato Soup IS tomato soup. My wife flabbergasted me early in our relationship by adding a tin of Italian chopped tomatoes and a tub of cream to a pot of Heinz, but this appeared blasphemous to me. It still does.

As a child and into my teens I wouldn’t eat any lumpy soup, and all the broths and bits were blended into a smoothness that didn’t revolt my undoubtedly OCD sensibilities. Everything changed when I went to University, living alone in what had become a tiny flat above the Glasgow dental surgery my dad still worked in, now expanded to take in the family’s former living quarters. Dad commuted daily from Troon, and once a week would deliver yoghurt tubs filled with whatever soup mum had been making the previous day.

At the time I tended to survive on beans and chips from the uni refectory, Spam in Milanda and Vesta curries, so when those wee containers arrived, were emptied and put in a pot to heat it was like opening a tunnel to the dinner table at home. The rich aroma of proper stock, probably from the chicken or beef I had missed that past Sunday. And it was never blended. Maybe mum had decided it was time for me to grow up. Anyway, I remember the first time I spooned that glorious mixture of unwhizzed barley, leek and carrot into my mouth, and chewed, feeling the soft vegetables disintegrate, the flavours of family explode. Home.

There are other soups. Motorcycle soups are always good, coming at the end of a long, chilling ride. Jon Beach of Fiddlers in Drumnadrochit provided Cullen Skink after I’d ridden from Norfolk to the Highlands in a one go, arriving unsteady and trembling with cold and fatigue. The smoked haddock, tatties and cream a wondrous emulsion, restorative along with the rare Ben Nevis whisky. Reestit mutton or tattie soup in Shetland, the perfect accompaniment to the shredded mutton itself, along with bannocks, especially consumed on a cold January Up Helly Aa night, after the vikings and guizers have burned their galley and the dancing has begun. Gazpacho on a brutally hot day in Spain, so popular they have to serve it in Iberian branches of McDonalds. Campbell’s chicken soup, condensed, mixed with Campbell’s mushroom, also condensed. Add some chicken thighs and Gordon Bleu’s mon oncle.

And sometimes, very occasionally, if it’s a cold day and I’ve been – heaven forfend – swimming or out in the kayak, Knorr Cup-a-Soup, instant vegetable, available wherever a kettle lurks. There used to be a cafe in Shetland that served it up, not cheaply, in a proper china cup. It was popular. But then there was no alternative for 40 miles in any direction.

For me, that is the closest you can get to the taste of Troon swimming pool, post-dip , in 1966. Salt, chemicals and some cheap fat. Gritty and hot, and somehow perfect.