All Casseroles are Haunted

A Casserole is in the oven, hopefully cooking.
This is my first attempt at cooking a casserole. If I had known it was so easy I would have done so before (cooking is not one of my strong points. We shall wait and see what it is like when it is cooked.
Despite the fact that I greatly enjoy casseroles (though haven't had one for years) there is something rather magnificently bleak about them. I'm not sure why this is. I suppose they remind me of the 1970s, a decade that despite my then-young age I remember well, a decade of serial killers in bleak northern towns, epidemic-coloured wallpaper, IRA bombings and an odd feeling of January-bleakness. At least this what comes across now when you see photographs of that time... even summer photographs of the 1970s look a bit wrong somehow, as if taken during a series of disturbing events.
Casseroles somehow manage to sum up all that strange decade's resonance.
They remind me of rainy evenings, soaked through from school and cold and uncomfortable. Nothing on the television - nothing good - probably Blue Peter or Screen Test or Record Breakers rather than the preferred choice of Grange Hill or whatever else I may have been watching at the time. I am, perhaps, in trouble at school, and this is weighing on my mind. The yellow light of the kitchen, either the one at Burnside, or the one at Southside, troubles me. Too yellow and humming with fluorescence. Too gloomy forever. Endless rain, no playing outside. Perhaps we are having casserole.
Casseroles are haunted.
I haven't tasted one in years, but that thick brown taste, delicious as it is, may make me think of dusty-dark rooms in wet winter afternoons, barely out of sleep in peeling wallpaper rooms. Narrow stairs leading up to spare rooms never used, looking out over the scrubby backs of untended gardens; rusting bikes, wheel-less wheelbarrows. All that detritus of places that belong to dreary, meaningful days.
Only half an hour and the first casserole since child will be cooked and ready to eat.