New paintings and regular art updates.
I used to toast these on the bars of the gas fire when I was a child. We used a fork hooked on by it’s prongs to the horizontal bars in front of the white ceramic blocks that the flames came up through.
Toasting the bottom of the crumpet first, then the top. It would get really hot and the butter would melt all the way down into the bubbled tubes of the crumpet. Delicious x
(not to be confused with English Muffins)
Esther Chiltons weekly prompt is waiting. I remember my school holidays.
I was waiting and waiting for the summer holidays to come. I remember being about 11, we had recently moved house and I was at a new school. We had a real garden, trees to climb, a swing and seesaw that dad had put up and I wanted to explore the area. My new friends and I would find new places to visit, the local arboretum, canals and the far end of the Broadway where my uncle and aunt lived. I was getting old enough to walk a few miles, or cycle around country lanes to go to parks for picnics. Those few weeks were really worth waiting for, everything seemed more colourful, exciting adventures like jumping across the local brook, or trying to collect insects. As I tried to balance on walls or climb up into the laburnum tree I was learning about the environment. At the end of the holidays I decided to get more interested in nature and was made a tree warden at school. That holiday was worth waiting for.
Reviewing old photos from a few years ago I came across some pictures of Dahlias. This one of a pompom Dahlia really resonated. I remembered my father used to grow them in the summer when I was a child. He had a whole patch of them, this shape and more shaggy ones. I remember I could see spirals in them. They were all different reds and oranges, whites and magenta and yellows. Striking against the green leaves and stems. They were in a small back garden and next to a pile of soil where we children would play ‘I’m the king of the castle get down you dirty rascak’ not sure how that worked except we competed to be at the top of the pile of soil…. Memories are random and come back infrequently. I just remember the Dahlias and sunshine.
Today is dry and windy. I might go out later but the pollen count is very high. I’m allergic to grass pollen. It started when I was a child, I would wake up with ‘sleep in my eyes’ gunged up with mucus. Then I did a painting in situ in the school playing fields, I was drawing and painting a van dumped on the field. In the week it was there I sat and drew it most lunchtimes. By the end of that week I had full blown hay-fever! I think it was because the grass was really tall and was distributing pollen.
Nowadays there are much better antihistamines, eye drops and nasal sprays. Thank goodness, the situation without them would be horrible. I walked past a garden full of overgrown grass a few years ago and I could not breathe! Sneezing, running eyes, all of the symptoms. I had to buy hay-fever tablets straight away to calm it down.
Mallaband-Brown