Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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The parents miss their homeland terribly. That two-month holiday makes them work even harder so that one day they will be prosperous enough to return for good. Never have the trials and tribulations of growing up and the human need for a sense of belonging been so heart-breakingly and humorously depicted.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides review: a warm, heartbreaking

A key moment in Pete Paphides’s memoir Broken Greek takes place when our young protagonist hears The Rubettes’ Sugar Baby Love for the first time and realises that, more than any other song in the world, this slice of bubblegum pop totally reflects his inner turmoil.Judging by the response on social media, Broken Greek has really touched a nerve. You have become, to use the vernacular, a legend. As if to prove their own point about the power of the human will, Teach-In task themselves with the challenge of singing lyrics that lapse into unabashed nonsense as if their world depended on it (which, on the night it won them the Eurovision Song Contest, it sort of did).

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Hello sunshine! ’Nothing.‘ ‘What’s your name, then?’ ’Nothing. Maybe a conciliatory shrug.‘ ‘All right. Are you going to give me a smile, then?’Nothing.‘Come on, you silly sausage!’ It's exactly the nightmare that every parent dreads when group holidays and big groups of children go away. Many of their friends are out there in Ios and it’s a very, very difficult time for them now, and we’d just ask them to look after each other over the next number of days," Mr Martin told RTÉ. Victoria works in the shop alone to give her increasingly tetchy husband Thursdays off. When pensioners, unable to afford a full portion, ask for a few chips she shovels some extra in for free. When word gets around it leads to many more pensioners coming to the shop on Thursdays, “slowly advancing” towards it “like turtles on a moonlit beach”. An exceptional coming-of-age story […] Pete Paphides may very well have the biggest heart in Britain’– Marina HydeAppropriately, then, there is something of the everyman in Broken Greek. Many of the challenges faced by young Paphides – building and maintaining friendships, figuring out his sexuality, developing cultural tastes, trying to work out how to be cool and to avoid getting beaten up by the local toughs – are standard childhood fare. It is in the telling that the author elevates his story to something rather beautiful. Cherry tomatoes, mixed greens, cucumbers, red onions, peppers, olives, feta, cucumber & parthena olive oil dressing

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides review – a smash hit

Once availed of these facts, listen to it and it’s like you’re listening to the saddest Wombles song of all time. I ADORE this utterly wonderful coming-of-age memoir. Joyful, clever, and a bit heartbreaking’– Nina Stibbe You pretty much debunk the whole idea of ‘guilty pleasures’. What is there to feel guilty about celebrating pop music that makes your day immeasurably better? All the below items are served with your choice of: Lemon Potatoes | Greek Fries | Avgolemono Soup | Feature Soup | Greek Salad In appraising the 1979 Abba album Voulez-Vous, for example, he points out what he feels the critics at the time missed: that the wildly contrasting state of the relationships between the band’s two couples – one married and in love, the other heading towards divorce – had a great impact on the music. His lengthy thesis is so quietly profound that you will never listen to the Swedish supergroup quite so lightly again.Pete Paphides’ memoir is a love letter to his Birmingham youth. It opens in 1977, when he is eight years old. His parents, who arrived from Greece a decade previously, have settled in the Midlands, where they run a fish and chip shop, and work all hours. I was surprised how much I missed the world you describe in Broken Greek . Inevitably, it seems like a more innocent time.

Pete Paphides

The book offers plenty of side dishes and B-sides: British class and racial history; the popularity of Blue Riband biscuits, a Proustian madeleine for anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s; the arrival of Pot Noodles, Channel 4 and VHS. (I am of a different generation, but can relate to taping songs off the radio and using gates as football goals.) In Dolly Mixture’s hands, Will He Kiss Me Tonight? sounded like The Ronettes seizing the means of control and coming up with something just as good and truer to life than any Brill Building A-lister could have provided. Bright, sporting, academic men who had their whole life ahead of them and looking forward to this particular trip for months on end and the planning had been ongoing, not just in our school but in lots of other schools. For the longest time, you risked getting yourself into a comparable argument if you declared that the epic 1977 Latin reinvention of the song by French producers Nicolas Skorsky and Jean Manuel de Scarano trumps all the others. Broken Greek isn’t all about the transcendent joy of discovering new bands. There are flashes of racism; and Paphides’s parents spend much of the time miserable, largely from working themselves too hard – in the case of Victoria, to the point of a hospital stay. But they clearly love their children (even if Dad isn’t always good at showing it) and incidents of kindness and friendship abound, despite economic and marital struggles.The sense that other people suffered the same hang-ups has been a revelation to me. Even today I got a tweet from someone who said they had a fear of being near tall buildings. She wanted to know if it still ever manifests itself in me. I’m 50 now so it feels like less of a gamble to go on the record with some of this stuff. If certain things happened to me, they must have happened to other people too. We’re scared a lot of the time when we’re little and it’s something you don’t want to admit, especially when you have children of your own. Some of it might seem trivial, but some of it might be psychically quite impactful. You know, it could be little Jimmy Osmond or it could be an emu. I mention not knowing the difference between Freddie Starr and Fred Astaire, but why would you? You don’t know anything! With every passing year, his guilty secret became more horrifying to him: his parents were Greek, but all the things that excited him were British. And the engine of that realisation? ‘Sugar Baby Love’, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, ‘Tragedy’, ‘Silly Games’, ‘Going Underground’, ‘Come On Eileen’, and every other irresistibly thrilling chart hit blaring out of the chip shop radio. Golden beets, grilled artichokes, figs, feta, green leaves, red onions, balsamic and parthena olive oil dressing Heartfelt, hilarious and beautifully written, Broken Greek is a childhood memoir like no other’– Cathy Newman He fantasises about “kind, compassionate Sting” replacing his schoolteacher and taking a class about the latest Police hit Message in a Bottle. But if Paphides had written an SOS “it would have probably said that I didn’t feel very Greek at all. That all the things I seemed to love… were British.” He has a brilliant antenna for the Britishness of certain records. Food for Thought, the debut single by Birmingham’s UB40, showed “what happened to reggae when you deprived it of sunshine. It sounded damp and subterranean.”