New paintings and regular art updates.
How do I reduce the size of my saved photos? I’m getting close to my limit again, so I’m still deleting pictures off blogs. But ideally I want to keep the photos. I could go into a post and edit each individual image, reducing the file size to medium or small? I’d only have to go through thousands of posts? I can’t afford to increase my WordPress /Jetpack package. So I’ll keep fudging things and deleting my most fuzzy or boring photos… Maybe I’ll win the lottery?
Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?
Christmas and Easter, we always had trifle.
It was a concoction of jelly (strawberry or raspberry) in the base with trifle sponges, hard fingers of dry sugary sponge that swelled up and absorbed the jelly. This made it firm when it set for the next layer. This was always blancmange, not custard. A raspberry, strawberry or chocolate layer made with blancmange powder, sugar and boiled in with a pint of milk. Then the top was double cream whipped to stiff peaks.
Mom used to decorate the top with silver coloured balls and hundreds and thousands (coloured sprinkles), or maybe some tinned peach slices or glacé cherries? When I was young we didn’t have strawberries or raspberries or blackberries in the winter or spring. Fruit was more seasonal than it is now. It was usually grown here, so it just wasn’t available.
Memories like this are great. Whenever I think of comfort food it has to be trifle. Mom’s secret ingredient as we got a bit older was sherry added to the jelly. Nowadays I prefer a small amount of port. I don’t use sponge fingers as they are full of sugar. I use sugar free jelly and sweetner in the blancmange (which is getting hard to source). It’s still full fat cream though. I usually put blueberries in the jelly, unheard of in my childhood days.
Maybe I could try pomegranate seeds in one? I like blackberries, maybe blackcurrants? And I’ve even considered making my own jelly with sheets of gelatine. However I make it, it still brings back good childhood memories.
Write about your first crush.
I was seven, he was eight. I think his name was Henry? We were in the same school. All the girls liked him. He had a nice laugh, he was tall, (about 3 ft 6 inches?) and he had blond hair. He was in the class above me.
I can remember playing tick and chasing round the playground after him. I remember standing on the wide shallow steps where we waited to go into school after breaks and jumping down them because he encouraged us to play tinker, taylor, soldier, sailor. Many old nursery rhymes had games made up to go with them. I don’t think he was bothered about me with my hornrimmed glasses and pudding bowl haircut. But it was only a crush, I was far too young to have any real interest in boys. I think I liked him because he was clever and kind…
I think he moved to a different school when he left junior school. I don’t remember ever seeing him again. It’s funny how you don’t think of anyone for years and then a prompt like this sparks a memory and there you are back in the past…
Just rememberd another nursery rhyme:
Georgie Porgie pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry,
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away!
And I remembered my grandmother has a teacup with a cartoon of this rhyme on it….
The world keeps spinning and I’m still here, one year older. I feel, I don’t know? Like I need to change, to try and be positive. I have escaped from last week’s or years thoughts. Maybe I can gain some strength now I’m a year older and wiser? I have fractured thoughts…
Grief holds you tight, you interpret things in its light. Your expectations change. Fear and worry hold your hand. A loss of a sibling? Never to speak again…. Memories sneak up on you. You peek round a corner and they pounce on you. Birthdays, bad days, no joy. But now? Can I look forward not back? I must try…
Someone just asked what people remembered of their grandparents house. I thought about the open fire in the hearth..
There was a coal fire, they used paper ‘spills’ to light it, my sisters and I would roll sheets of newspaper into long thin tubes which were the spills… Grandma once had a chimney fire. She used to ‘draw’ the air through the chimney with a sheet of newspaper held against the front of the fire. She would leave a little gap at the bottom and the wind above the chimney would draw the air up, and with it the flames from the kindling she had lit (usually small sticks of wood). Once she had it burning she would bank it up with coal and we would stare at the lovely warm flames. But I remember one day the chimney hadn’t been swept and the soot inside it caught fire! I think the firebrigade had to put it out. I remember being outside watching black smoke and flames coming out of the top of the chimney!
Other memories? A big tin bath on a shelf at the far end of the kitchen before they had an inside bathroom. And grandma’s handmade rag rug made by pushing short lengths of cloth through an old sack cloth so it made a shaggy cloth mat which lay in front of the hearth.
Our grandparents had a chicken coop in the back garden and I remember the hens too. I must have been very young… Vague memories…
Arnold, sketch from four years ago when I attended the annual urban sketchers meet up that was held in Stoke-on-Trent that year (2019?). Just came up on my Facebook memories. It’s a drawing of the statue of Arnold Bennett which is in our city centre in Hanley.
Describe your dream chocolate bar.
“Aztec was a chocolate bar produced by Cadbury’s from 1967. It was made of nougat and caramel covered with milk chocolate and was sold in a deep purple wrapper. The Aztec was created by Cadbury’s to compete with the Mars Bar, but it was discontinued in 1978. Wikipedia“
Yes I remember them well..
I bought many of them withy pocket money. They were tasty and different. I was really disappointed when they were discontinued. Perhaps they were too expensive to make? I remember there was a strange TV programme on in the early 1970’s about Aztecs, it was a children’s adventure series. I only remember it because I associated it with Aztec Bars.
I can’t say much more about them, it was just a strange mix of textures and tastes, but they were really nice. Like so many things though they either end or the recipie is changed, leaving disgruntled customers…
Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
I was about ten when I read Old Yeller written in 1956 by Fred Gipson.
I only have a memory that it was set in the southern area of America, maybe texas. There’s a boy who is helping run a farm and he takes in a stray dog which he calls old Yeller because it’s yellow coloured. I think they had adventures, a bit like Lassie. But eventually the dog was bitten by something that had rabies and was infected. The boy had to decide what to do and I can see in my mind that the dog has to be tied to a tree so it can’t bite anyone. Eventually it has to be shot. I can’t remember what happened next, but I do know it really upset me. I guess that’s why it’s stuck in my memory. I think Disney made a film of it, but I don’t remember seeing it. I do think the book cover had a yellow dog, like a labrador on it.
I enjoyed other books, Nancy Drew, The Hardy boys, and books on myths and legends, but Old Yeller really stuck.
Something in my brain ‘dings’
I remember how the song ‘sings’
Music has a way of sticking
Notes together, metronome ticking.
Sound comes back as mouth opens
Words come out, with the vocals
Songs from months or years ago
We remember how they go!
From some dark corner of my mind..
My vocal chords my brain reminds
The timing, tempo, notes and all..
Into a pattern they all fall
My joy as memory keeps going
And music, memories it keeps sowing…
Do you remember life before the internet?
I do remember, but it’s a long time ago. I even remember the time before PC’s. I can remember seeing them at school just before I left. Obviously there were computers before that but they were massive things with rotating discs of tape, or before that mechanical calculators that could be used to work out enemy codes for combating attacks in war.
I think the “Internet” was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I’m not sure exactly when, but he came up with the idea of the “World Wide Net”. The idea of a Web of knowledge was often talked about in science fiction stories as I was growing up. Computers had strange names like “multivac”? They would become sentient over time and would decide to take over how humans ran the world, realising the damage we were doing. Often only being foiled in their plans by some ingenious human.
I guess what they were talking about fifty or sixty years ago is what could come from ChatGPT now. And the Internet, which could be seen as a huge web of synapses, might allow that spark of genius to ignite.
Would the Internet have emotions? Or would it rather be senseless as it has no way really to experience them. So many questions that have been investigated in the old style of science fiction stories. Not the “cowboys in space” sort, but old fashioned storytelling by people like Issac Asimov, or Arthur C. Clarke, or others of their era. Literature may have some answers for us.
I remember the time before the Internet. It was good to do adventurous things, and we had to learn things from books. Sometimes it was very boring. But I do remember the moon landings. So exciting!
Mallaband-Brown