“For Gawd’s sake don’t smile”.

It’s been awhile since I had a look through the old family photo album, and as you know I like to show you my favourite pictures from time to time, and this is just one of them …

… It shows my mother (right) and … … Well that is the question … 

Do you ever look at family photographs and wonder who the other people are who appear in them ?

I don’t just mean the people in the background on the beach or beside you at the fair. I mean those who must have meant something to your relatives as they posed beside them in formal portraits or are included in ‘family’ groups.

I wonder who this unhappy looking young woman was ?

This picture was probably taken soon after World War I, so could the girl in black be mourning the loss of a loved one, or could it be that she and my mother were just obeying the photographer’s instructions not to smile ? Probably the latter as most people looked bloody miserable in the photographs from that era.

To me she has the air about her of an ‘Eliza Doolittle’. I wonder if she ever met …

…      ‘er ‘enery ‘iggins ?      

Just another one of those ‘days’.

One of my earliest memories is of being given an old flower pot and a small onion by my teacher and being instructed to put the ‘onion’ in the pot and cover it with earth. She said that this would make a nice surprise for my mother on Mothering Sunday.

At the time I was a bit puzzled by this, until she explained that the onion was actually a flower bulb, which in a few weeks would produce a lovely yellow daffodil.

My pot stood on the classroom windowsill along with those of my classmates until, sure enough, just before the big day it ‘blossomed’ into a drooping little plant which I proudly carried home to my mum.

Now we have MOTHER’S DAY ! … Yet another import from our friends ’across the pond’.

Don’t get me wrong, for I’m all in favour of honouring our mothers. I would just prefer for it still to be done in the traditional British way, with children visiting their mothers with a simple gift of flowers, or perhaps a home made card.

Once again, I believe that ‘Mothering Sunday’ was once a religious festival which had nothing to do with ‘mothers’. It was in fact to do with visiting your ‘mother church’ on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

It’s now the third Sunday before Easter, and the florists, confectioners, greetings card manufacturers and all the rest are rubbing their hands as they  start counting their profits.

How long do you think it will take them to realize that in the USA ‘Mother’s Day’ is celebrated on the second Sunday in MAY ?

Blimey ! If they re-stock the shops with their surplus mummy’s day ’tat’ immediately after they have cashed in on Easter, they can ’take two bites at the cherry’.

I’m now off to visit my daughter and enjoy a (Mothering) Sunday lunch and family gathering, where I shall make certain I remind everyone that …

…    it’s only 15 weeks ’til bloody ‘Father’s Day’ ! 

A present from ‘the past’.

Today is my 69th birthday, so it’s only one more to go before the old ‘three score years and ten’, although for the past few days I have been feeling more like a hundred and ten, as I’ve been limping about like ‘Long John Silver’ with a pain in my right hip.

Now I read somewhere that ‘laughter is the best medicine’ and also that it triggers the release of endomorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.

Well it’s a bloody lie, because I’m still suffering, although this morning I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I opened a birthday present from my daughter and saw what at first I took to be an old copy of a genuine police manual …

That is until I saw the name of the author … Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt !

Now the name will not be familiar to you unless you are a fan of the TV show ‘Life on Mars’ (on BBC America) about a present day policeman who finds himself in the very un-politically correct time of .. “you’re nicked sunshine” .. and .. “eat the wall scumbag” ..  world of 1974 ‘good cop bad cop’ Gene Hunt. 

Now I know that most people stagger back from the pub, but I’m going to stagger down to the pub for a birthday lunch with my wife, before settling down for a lesson from Gene Hunt on ‘interrogating suspects’, and the almost forgotten  ’thief takers’ art of …

…      ‘getting them to talk (Physical)’. 

“A house without books is like … “

Neither of my parents had much of an education, both having left school at an early age.

My father started work when he was thirteen, taking over a milk delivery round from a man who had gone off to fight in World War I in 1914. My dad always joked that the horse that pulled the cart was smarter than he was.

My mother left school at a similar age and had just started work in a draper’s shop when that war ended in 1918.

Although lacking in formal education they were both literate and far from stupid, in fact my mother, who worked in a laundry for most of her life (it paid a shilling a week more than the drapers) ended up running the place, after she undertook to do the ‘book-keeping’ and other clerical work, even though she had never been trained to do so.

Now I have to say that although my formal education lasted until I was sixteen (and a half) I was not the greatest of scholars and my school reports always had lots of .. ”must try harder” .. or .. ”needs to pay more attention” .. comments when it came to such subjects as maths, science or Latin. However, I wasn’t too bad at ’English Language’ and always enjoyed the ’English Literature’ lessons: but how I hated that homework! … I would sit at the kitchen table struggling with logarithms and bloody theorems or trying to memorize “amo, amas, amat” and wondering why plurals didn’t end in ’s’, and verbs had to go at the end of sentences.

My parents couldn’t help me with my homework, but they did more to educate me than they ever knew, when they forked out some of their hard earned cash for me to join a book club.  

Although I used to borrow books from the public library, the ones I got in the mail every few weeks were mine to treasure until this day. Reading them and re-reading them stimulated my interest in literature, and led to the eclectic collection of books which now weigh down my bookshelves.

The actor Michael Caine is famous for his … “Not a lot of people know that” … when divulging some little known fact, and when I sometimes do the same, and am asked … ”How did you know that ?”… I simply reply …

…   “I must have read it in a book sometime.”  

What happened to … ‘Living within your means’ ?

When I was a child I was taught to save my pennies if I wanted something, and never to borrow money.

 “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”… My mother would quote to me, and by and large I have stuck to it, with the major exception of a mortgage to enable me to set up home and the minor one of the odd item of furniture purchased on the ‘never never’ hire purchase system back in the early1960’s, so that my new wife and I would not have to sleep on the floor.

If I fancied a holiday in Bournemouth or later Benidorm, it was a case of putting so much per week away in the old Post Office savings account, and it took bloody years before I could afford my first car.

At times I have been short of a few bob and payday often seemed a long time coming, but I rarely resorted to ‘my flexible friend’.

Now it seems that in our ‘must have it now’ society millions of people are in what is called a ’spendemic’ which is largely fuelled by their desire for an instant ’celeb’ lifestyle.

A new report reveals a huge rise in the amount that people spend on ‘non-essential’ items, which includes restaurants, hotels, jewellery and holidays, and during the last ten years a typical person’s spending on these items has increased by 65 per cent. During the same period the number of credit cards in this country has doubled.

It would seem that while many people in this country struggle to ‘make ends meet’, millions of others … “are caught in a spiral of conspicuous consumption”.

It’s being called the ‘Hello ! factor’ after the magazine for people who never read. I presume that …

…   must also include their bank statements.  

Swallow this !

Earlier this week my wife had an appointment at the hospital to  have an ‘endoscopy’. This is a very unpleasant procedure where a small camera is shoved down your throat into your stomach for a look around inside your digestive system.

The hospital had warned her that the procedure was fairly quick, but that there would be a delay before she could go home as it would take an hour or two for the anaesthetic to wear off and that she would need to be accompanied by a friend or relative as she would  probably feel ‘groggy’ for some time.

When we arrived at the hospital a nurse asked for my mobile phone number in case I had wandered off for a coffee or something when my wife was taken to the recovery room after the procedure had been performed.

As my wife was led away by a friendly nurse, I settled down in the waiting room for a long wait and started reading a new book which my daughter had given to me at Christmas.

I was only half way through chapter two when my wife reappeared and started putting on her coat  …

“What’s up ?” I asked, suspecting some problem.

“Nothing” … she answered … “I’ve been done, we can go home now”.

“What about recovering from the anaesthetic ?” I queried.

“Oh !”… she replied … ”I decided not to have it”

Now I don’t often refer to my wife in my posts, and if I do I usually refer to her as ’she who must be obeyed’ or ‘the old trouble and strife’, while at home I often call her by her pet name of ‘Mein Führer’, but in view of what I can only call her nerves of steel, she will henceforth be know as …

…    ‘Wonder Woman’  ! 

As it was ? … Well almost.

Earlier today I discovered, by accident, a BBC website for children all about what it was like to be a kid in this country during World War II.

I must say that I felt very much at home visiting this website, firstly because I was a child during those troubled times and secondly because the content is aimed at 7 - 9 year olds.

The ‘Wartime Home’ section shows a house a lot like the one I lived in. I especially liked the illustration of the ’scullery’ although the one in our house was more scruffy and lacked the gas water heater, and I wasn’t ‘posh’ enough to have a water jug and basin in my bedroom, although I did have another piece of ‘china’ under the bed.

We ‘lived’ in the kitchen as the sitting room (known as the front room) was only used for special occasions, that is until the night when Herr Hitler decided to bring down the ceiling and wreck the front of the house.

Some of the photographs brought back memories like …

• I have slept in one of … THESE.   
• I’ve worn one of … THESE.
• and … I’ve seen a lot of … THIS.

I can’t relate too much to the section on evacuees as I only spent a short time in the country with my mother and an aunt, before returning to London just in time for the ‘Blitz’. I just can’t imagine today’s ‘little darlings’ being labelled and shipped off to some unknown destination, not knowing if they would ever return.

My best friend’s big sister was named Vera, so it was nice to meet up with her again after all these years, and she even managed to rustle up my favourite potato pancakes. (I would have eaten anything in those days).

I don’t know what today’s children would make of the information given on this site. It must be hard for them to imagine a world without … pizzas … television … ice cream … central heating … frozen food … bananas … and … supermarkets; but I do like the idea of kids learning about how another generation of children lived in the days of shared bathwater, blackout curtains and ration books.

The only thing that is missing from the virtual tour of the house (’an exact copy of a real family’s wartime home’) is the ‘loo’. Now this could have been shown inside or outside the house with a ‘hot link’ highlighting the cut up newspaper hanging from a nail in the wall … I wonder …

…  how Vera would have explained that ?  

My bestest Christmas card.

A little girl named Rebecca designed this Christmas card which brought a smile to my face when I received it today, …

… but my smile soon turned to a chuckle when I read her mother’s explanation printed inside the card …

• Snowman with snow falling all around.
• A present with star on top.
• Jesus AS A BIG BOY.
• The manger.
• Baby Jesus.
• The big shining star.

…   How could it be anything else ?