Jon Ashton

We hope you can join us for the Anyone Can Cook Alaska Sailing from September 3rd through September 10th, 2026.

Enjoy breathtaking glaciers, whale sightings, cozy evenings at sea, and unforgettable moments shared together.

We shall be filling the D Lounge with laughter, kindness, stories, and comforting dishes made with heart, including:

Blackened Alaskan Salmon Tacos

Chicken Tikka Poutine

Red Lentil Soup with Roasted Butternut Squash Grilled Cheese

Come hungry for wonderful food, beautiful scenery, and a little culinary magic along the way.

The Quiet Current

The summer I was nine, my mother had to go away for work, and nobody would tell me how long. What I was told instead was that I'd be staying with Granny Ashton, at 54 Barford Road, halfway along a narrow Liverpool street where hardly anybody owned a motorcar and children played football against the alley walls until the light turned thin and blue and somebody's mother called them in.

I packed my own case. I remember that folding things badly, because folding them at all felt like agreeing to something.

At nine, I believed Barford Road would last a week, perhaps two, and then the world would tip back upright. That is the strange mercy of childhood: you live inside forever without knowing it is already leaving, and you mistake the worst summers for the long ones.

Barford Road was poor, though I did not yet have the word for it. I only knew the feeling of it: cold lino beneath bare feet, damp coats behind the kitchen door, milk bottles clinking at dawn while the city rubbed the sleep from its eyes. With so few cars, the silence settled long enough to hear pigeons shifting on the chimney pots, a wireless murmuring through an open window down the road, and, that first night, when I thought the house was asleep, the sound of my own crying, which I tried very hard to keep to myself and did not manage to.

Granny's house was soot-dark brick with a front gate that clicked twice whenever it opened. You had to lift it slightly before pushing, or it would get stuck halfway. Everybody on Barford Road knew that. Her kitchen was small and warm and smelled of strong tea, of toast caught at the edges, of damp wool drying by the fire, and whatever was bubbling slowly on the hob. The sofa springs sighed when you sat too heavily. The tea tasted stronger there than anywhere on earth, sweet enough to ache your teeth if you drank it too fast.

On the mantel stood an old brass clock with yellowed hands and a cracked glass face, the crack splitting the number four neatly in half, which bothered me every single time I looked at it. Every Sunday after tea, Granny wound it with a tiny silver key she kept in the sugar bowl, though it had not kept time in years. Sometimes it ticked for a few hopeful seconds. Then fell quiet. She never explained the clock, and I knew, the way children know things before they have language for them, that it was not a thing you asked about.

Most of what I learned that summer I learned in that kitchen, with my sleeves rolled up and my feet not quite reaching the floor.

"Put the kettle on, love," she'd say, as naturally as breathing. The first morning, she set a bowl of potatoes in my lap and handed me a peeler.

"Slow now. There's nowhere we have to be."

I wanted to be anywhere else outside, or better, home, but she showed me how the cool skin slipped beneath the blade, how the earth still smelled faintly on them, and how the peelings curled into the bowl like scraps of paper.

"Most of life is potatoes, love," she said. "Washing up. Waiting on the kettle.

Sweeping the step. Rush through the ordinary bits to get to the good part, and one day you'll look up and find you rushed clean past most of it. "I was fairly certain Granny Ashton had never once had any proper fun in her life, and I peeled the next potato faster out of spite, and she let me and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

Three doors up lived Mr. Sutcliffe and his enormous grey lurcher, Major. I crossed the road whenever I saw them coming.

"What is it you're afraid of?" Granny asked.

"The dog might bite me," I said. "Has he ever?" No.

"Then it's a tale you're telling yourself."

A week later, Major lay his long, grey head on my knee and sighed as though life itself had let him down personally, and I could not, for the life of me, remember what I had been so frightened of. I was learning that most of the things I feared lived only in the telling, though it would take me a great deal longer than that summer to believe it about the bigger ones.

The Hartley boy at the top of the road had polished shoes and a bright red bicycle with silver handlebars that flashed in the sun. I wanted that bicycle with the kind of wanting that aches in your ribs. One afternoon, I told Granny it wasn't fair, and she went on kneading bread, her swollen knuckles dusted white.

"Wanting's a hungry thing, love," she said. "Feed it, and it only grows."

Then she tore the warm heel from yesterday's loaf and pressed it into my hand.

"There. That's a real thing, and it's yours."

I ate it on the front step while the Hartley boy rode past ringing his bell, and somewhere between the bread and the sunlight, I stopped minding quite so much, though I'd be lying if I said I didn't still watch that bicycle through the curtains every time it passed.

It was a Sunday when she finally frightened me, and not in the way I'd feared.

I'd been mucking about by the fire and knocked the clock with my elbow, and it gave a small tin rattle, and Granny was across that kitchen faster than I'd ever seen her move.

"Leave it," she said, not loudly, which was worse than loudly. Her hands were shaking. I shrank back against the sofa and felt the old summer loneliness rise up in my throat all at once, and I thought, I want my mother; I want to go home; I don't even know how long she is going to be gone. For a long moment, neither of us said anything. The kettle ticked on the hob.

Then she sat down heavily, the springs sighing, and took the clock into her lap.

"It was your grandad's," she said. "He wound it every Sunday of his life, and the Sunday he didn't, I knew before I came downstairs."

She turned the silver key gently, the way you'd touch a sleeping thing. "It stopped a week after he went. I never had it mended. Some part of me reckoned that if I kept winding it, it might remember how." She looked at me then, properly, the way grown-ups almost never look at children.

"I'm not cross with you, love. I'm cross with the clock for not being him."

She held out the key.

I wound it. Tick. Tick. Tick. Then the silence came back, the way it always did. But she nodded, as if I had done the thing correctly, as if something had been handed across.

After that, the house felt different, not lighter, exactly, but shared. We were two people missing somebody, which is a quieter, better thing than one person missing someone alone.

One afternoon, she took me down to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, where the water moved slowly and brown beneath the willows, and the air smelled of mud and rain-soaked grass. I rowed furiously against the current until my palms stung and my arms burned, and the boat barely moved at all. A duck burst out of the reeds and startled me so badly I nearly dropped an oar, and Granny laughed until she had to wipe her eyes on her cardigan sleeve, the only time all summer I heard her laugh like that, helpless and young. Then she leaned forward, lifted the oars from my hands, and laid them dripping in the bottom of the boat.

At once, the current turned us downstream, past the reeds, past dragonflies skimming the surface, past long green weeds combing slowly underneath, and the only sounds were the lap of water on the hull and a wood pigeon somewhere beyond the trees.

"Sometimes," she said, almost smiling, "you have to stop pushing so hard and let the river carry you a bit."

I sat there red-faced and breathless, watching the banks slide by without effort, and felt something in me come loose that had been clenched tight since the morning I packed my case.

We came home to fogged windows. Granny wound the clock before she put the sausages under the grill and burned the first one because she got distracted watching the rain. "Don't make a song and dance of it," she said when I pointed at the smoke. She mashed the potatoes with more butter than we could really afford, and the gravy came from a little blue tin beside the tea caddy, and we ate mostly in silence with the rain tapping the glass.

When I looked up, the burnt sausage was still sitting untouched on her plate. Without really thinking, I cut my own in half and slid the bigger piece across to her.

"No, no, you keep it," she said. But I nodded at the burnt one and shrugged.

"Major would probably fancy that one anyway." She laughed softly then, not at the joke, but because she knew I was no longer frightened of him and, I think, because she understood, before I did, what I had actually offered her. I had never known until that moment that giving something away could leave you feeling fuller instead of emptier.

My mother came home after two weeks. I went back to her, and the world tipped upright again, and Barford Road shrank in the way the most enormous places of childhood always do once you leave them.

I am thousands of miles from that street now, and Granny has been gone many years, long enough that I have stopped expecting the click of that gate when I dream about it, though I still hear it. I do not know what became of the clock. Somebody likely threw it out when they cleared the house, not knowing it was a husband, a marriage, and a way of grieving, thinking it was only a broken clock that wouldn't keep time.

But sometimes, late at night, when the rain presses against the kitchen windows at Happy Days Cottage and the kettle is singing to itself, I catch the smell of tea and warm bread, and I am nine again, in a small, warm room, beside a woman winding a clock that will not go.

I still row harder than I need to. I still lose whole afternoons carrying things that were never mine to carry.

Sometimes, when the rain is hard enough, I find the silver key in my mind, and I wind the old clock once more, not because I think it will keep time, but because some part of me still reckons that if I keep winding it, it might remember how.

Bangers and Mash with Onion Gravy

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1½ pounds Cumberland sausages, about 6 links
2 onions, halved and thinly sliced
½ cup water, plus 1 tablespoon, divided
2½ cups beef broth
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme
½ teaspoon minced fresh rosemary
1¼ teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon Marmite (optional)
½ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon table salt
1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

Directions:

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat until it shimmers softly. Lay the sausages in the saute pan and cook until browned on two sides, turning once, about 5 minutes.

Push the sausages to one side of the pan. Scatter the onions across the bottom and settle the sausages on top. Pour in ½ cup of water and cover immediately with a lid. Let everything cook gently, turning the sausages once, until they are cooked through and the onions have softened, about 10 minutes.

While the sausages cook, whisk together the beef broth, Marmite, mustard, thyme, and rosemary in a measuring jug until the Marmite dissolves into the stock.

Transfer the sausages to a plate and loosely cover with foil to keep warm.

Spread the onions evenly across the skillet and cook without stirring until they begin to catch and color at the edges, about 5 minutes. If they seem reluctant, turn the heat up slightly. Continue cooking, stirring now and then, until the onions are deeply golden and the bottom of the pan is stained with rich brown bits, another 3 to 5 minutes.

Stir in the sugar, pepper, and salt. Cook for 1 minute.

Pour in the broth mixture and raise the heat to medium-high. Bring to a lively simmer, scraping up every sticky browned bit from the bottom of the pan. Let the gravy reduce slightly for about 5 minutes.

In a small bowl, stir together the cornstarch and the remaining tablespoon of water until smooth. Whisk this into the gravy and cook until glossy and thick enough to coat a spoon, about 2 minutes.

Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the butter, one piece at a time, until the gravy turns silky. Stir in the red wine vinegar and taste for seasoning.

Scatter with parsley and serve generously over buttery mashed potatoes with the sausages nestled on top.