Ring O' Bells

Back in my previous incarnation in England and when I was in my early 20s I occasionally pulled ropes and rang church bells. In fact I nearly ended my life as a result when a bellrope came off the bellwheel  and snaked around my neck. Fortunately someone behind me (not ringing a bell) saw it and got the rope away from my neck before it was pulled up again by the weight of the bell. Such occurrences are infrequent but can have dire consequences. "Hung by the Church Bell" does not look good on a church gravestone.   

My wife to be was a proper campanologist.

Next to the church which we attended (and in which we were married) was a hostelry aptly known as The Ring'O Bells.  There in 'Ernie's Snug' we gathered after ringing for a pint or two of best bitter. 

That was over half a century ago. 

The last time I went into the hostelry was a good few years ago and I felt like a complete stranger. The inside of the hotel had been completely gutted and was a beautiful, modern hostelry with plenty of food being served. If I had still lived there I wondered if it was still a 'local' for some old codgers who would pop in for a pint. 

Mind you I can't remember when I last had a 'pint' or any draught beer for that matter. My alcoholic drink of choice for the last 40 + years has been wine.

I must get back to blogging more regularly and try and ressurect some of my old memories too.  

Awake with a Memory

I woke this morning at 5am. I lay awake for a few minutes and was just about to turn over and go back to the Land of Nod when ideas suddenly started flooding into my head. All sorts of ideas about all sorts of things. It was as if my Memory had suddenly been turned on. Now those of you who have known me for years know that I was born with a very poor ability to remember things. Facts and lists and information just don't stick with me which is why I loathe quizzes with a passion. I am totally hopeless. The children of my New Zealand Family loved them and were always trying to get me to take part (my other pet dread was Monopoly).

Having a good memory is regarded as one of the things that equates to intelligence. When I was reading for my first degree at University I was told by my course tutor that if I ever did any post grad study then do it by dissertation not exam. I was good at essays and research and always got A to A++ in my written work submitted (except for a notorious economics paper where I got a C and caused a laugh when I said that understanding economics was, for me, like going forward in reverse gear.).

My entire adult life has been a matter of lists and notes to remind me 'to do' 'to remember' etc. If I do not have my diary then I am lost - totally. If I didn't have my diaries going back to the year dot then I would have no memory - just memories. There is a subtle difference. The brain is a strange and wonderful place.

So I am sitting at my laptop at 5.20am feverishly trying to make notes and recall the ideas for blog posts that I was thinking about when I woke.

I love Blogland and blogging but life at the moment is so full of living that I've not actually been participating in commenting or writing blog posts. I have been reading where I can. I can do that on my phone when I'm waiting for someone or something but, as most people will know, trying to comment on a phone involves signing in every time one wants to comment which is a pain.

I can't promise to get up at 5am every day (or ever again for that matter) but at least at 6am I have had two coffees, fed the birds and the fishes and still have 6½ hours before I'm meeting my son for lunch. 

Blogland and "Real Life"

It had been my intention this month to spend a lot more time in Blogland. Unfortunately my "other" life has been dominant. I was going to say my "real" life but in truth Blogland has been a very important part of my life, real or otherwise, since 2007 right through my New Zealand life and through the thick and thin. I have also made some of my most important friends through Blogland and despite the fact that I don't see many of my New Zealand friends in person now we are still in touch frequently. Indeed during these awful times for New Zealand we have all been in touch a lot.

Other friends I've met through Blogland but whom I've never met in person have become a significant part of my life too - you know who you are and I thank you for that friendship. It's one of the things that keeps me in Blogland even though a few of us are in contact outside of Blogland and Monica and I still play Words With Friends (Scrabble) every day which we have done now for, I think, 10 years. Kate and I communicate daily too and have been in touch since a day (which I remember well) lost in the mists of time but which I could go back to in my New Zealand blog.  Gosh, tempus fugit. 

My Blogs are also my memories. 

This was actually going to be a post about New Zealand but that will have to wait because there are far too many other things on the agenda today and I want to do it justice.

Lewis Memories - 1

When we bought our first house on Lewis we moved in in February 1976. I had already been here for 3 months. I, and a colleague, had been boarding with Mrs Thompson (or was it Thomson) in Stornoway. Mrs Thompson appeared to know everyone on  Lewis and certainly was an excellent person to tutor my colleague and I in the ways of the Stornoway world that we might otherwise have missed out on. There didn't appear to be anyone nor anything that Mrs Thompson didn't know and we were the beneficiaries of that knowledge in the three months I lived there.

The first, and most important lesson, was that before any food or drink was taken at any time grace was said. Mr Thompson's graces could be very long. It was not unusual, therefore, for our evening supper cup of tea and Scotch pancakes to go cold whilst the grace was said. Mrs Thompson always quietly took our tea away and refilled the cups with a hot brew. However, occasionally, there would be a gap between the supper being laid before us and the grace being said. Occasionally without thinking my colleague or I would take a bite of the pancake. We would then have to sit there for a long time with this morsel in our mouth frightened to chew and unable to swallow. Those were the longest graces. 

First Lines

I have a bad memory: I always have had. It is a strange irony that people constantly tell me what a good memory I have. Like most people I can recall certain things.

The Big Book Clearout made me think about first lines and I wondered how many I could recall. The answer is that the number of first lines I can accurately recall is remarkably small. However the number that I can almost recall surprised me.

I can recall several verbatim:

“No one had expected Ernest to die, least of all Ernest.” from Dead Ernest by Frances Garrood.

"The Mole had been working very hard all [the]* morning, spring cleaning his little home." The Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Graham.

"It was morning and the [new]* sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea." Johnathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson.

"Pip the pixie was doing the washing for his Aunt Twinkle." The Adventures of Pip by Enid Blyton. 

There are many of which I can recall the general wording but had to check:

"The French are proud of the fact that they are the last people to invade the British Isles." 1000 Years of Annoying The French by Stephen Clarke.

"I have very pale skin, very red lips." Skin by Joanna Briscoe. (An odd book for a man to find intriguing, I suspect.)

"It is always difficult to find a beginning." An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. (A book that had a very very profound effect on me.)

"The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it." Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.

I was ashamed not to be able to recall the first lines of Tolstoy's War and Peace given that I've read it three times or The Piano Shop on the Left Bank which is one of my favourite books but whose author (T E Cathcart) I could not recall either.

I'm sure that there are very many other books which should spring into what passes for my mind but they haven't. 

Does anyone else remember first lines?

* Not quite verbatim, having checked.

Memories of Games

During a certain period of my childhood Saturday night was very habitual. Dad went to the Broadgreen Abbey Hotel to meet some of his friends and Mum and I and younger brother CJ went to our maternal grandmother’s house about 15 minutes walk away. There was no television, of course, so we usually played games: cards or dominoes being the most usual so far as I can recall although we did play some simple board games too like Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. The card games were usually Newmarket, chase the ace and rummy.

I should add that later, until my grandmother came to live with us, Dad or Mum (often accompanied by CJ or I) went to my grandmother's for supper every night around 9pm to check that she was okay.

This was all brought back to mind this week when, having finished a complete refurbishment of the main guest bedroom, I started moving things from their current temporary homes to a new storage place in the bedroom. One of those things was the stock of games I have kept: some of which date back to those days at my grandmother’s.

Almost all the games were inherently 'betting' games (eg Newmarket or chase the ace) and, of course, lives had to be won and lost and scores had to be kept. For that purpose and when playing 'Put and Take' (see the little brass spinner in the beans) we had my grandmother's tin of beans: the St Bruno Flake tin with the very beans we used back then. Later when I had my own family we used the Marmite jar filled with dried fruit stones. I cannot remember when the tiddlywinks first came into the family but, of course, we had some of them (and probably that box) since the '50s anyway.

I used to play rummy, cribbage and dominoes with Dad. I occasionally won at rummy but at the other two Dad was unbeatable. These dominoes are not from that era but Dad made the cribbage board out of a slab of solid brass and the holes were square(ish) to take the Swan Vestas matchsticks Dad used to light his pipe.

In those days Patience was played a great deal as it was until the presence of versions of patience appeared on every mobile device. Generally we used ordinary playing cards but most had 'travel packs' for playing in more confined spaces from one's hospital bed to railway carriages.

As a child I loved draughts (another game that Dad usually dominated in the winning stakes) and chess (a game Dad didn't play). My first chess set was this boxwood Staunton set but when I went into hospital for several longish spells when I was in my mid teens a lady who lived nearby gave me the red-boxed travel set which I used for many many decades. I am astonished that it has survived so well.

Two games my wife and I played were Bezique and Othello

Pass The Pig was a more recent addition to our games. When our son, Andy, was dying in hospital Pass The Pig seemed to be copeable with.

A Career Starts

and ends almost as quickly.

When I left school I joined Ayrton Saunders Ltd, a Liverpool firm of Manufacturing Chemists with considerable interests abroad, whose headquarters was in Hanover Street in Liverpool's city centre where the company had been established in 1868.  The 1898 archive material gives a lively read of what it was like to visit the company's premises at that time.

I joined the firm as a trainee accountant in those same premises.  I think that I lasted about 6 weeks.  Accountancy wasn't for me despite maths being one of my strongest subjects.  That six weeks did give me plenty of stories though.  

I never set foot inside the building once I'd left and in the last 40 years I've rarely walked down Hanover Street.  When CJ and I were in Liverpool during August I went to see whether the building was still there.  It was.

Hanover Street is narrow so taking a photo of the building was quite a challenge.  The parallax effect of viewing from so close was unavoidable so I'll call it an artistic view.  The name of Ayrton Saunders can be seen underneath "Gostin Furniture" on the apex of the facade.

An Hostelry

When I was in my 20s I used to frequent a little country pub on the Wirral.  It was called The Wheatsheaf at Raby.  When CJ, Jo and I were returning from one of our outings we passed it and stopped for a photo.  What really worried me was that although I recall that ‘the gang’ used to meet there a lot on our regular nights out I didn’t remember it inside at all.  In fact the only thing I could recall is that it was virtually impossible to park the car anywhere near it on a Thursday or Friday night.  One day I shall return.  Hopefully it will either be a cold winter night and the fire will be burning warm and welcoming or it will be a beautiful, warm and sunny summer evening.  The things of which memories are made.

How Old Are Your Shoes?

These are possibly not the most beautiful and certainly not the most fashionable of shoes.  But they are supremely comfortable.  So they should be.  I’ve been wearing this pair for over 40 (yes, forty) years.  I’m pretty light on shoes!  So why am I mentioning shoes?  Someone made a comment during dinner a week or so ago that They’d had their shoes for several years and the shoes were getting passed it.  I happened to be wearing these shoes at the time.

The Forgettory

Little irks me these days because I prize life too much. But I just wrote an entire posting of great wit and consequence which Blogger would not save and which I managed to erase by pressing Ctrl V instead of Ctrl C. Silly me. BUGGER! There. Got that off my chest.

I'm not sure whether forgettory has one or two ts but, as it was a word my Mum made up I don't suppose it matters. My Mum at 93 reckoned she had a forgettory in place of a memory. For all that, her ability to remember was better at 93 than mine is 30 years previous to that age. And, I am wondering, can one have both a memory and a forgettory? So what you may ask is the relevance of that ramble? You shouldn't have asked 'cos I don't need any encouragement to tell you.

I recently adopted the gismos that bloggers like Simply Heather uses at the foot of each posting and which suggests three more postings to look at from the archives of the blog. I find it interesting on other peoples' blogs but I can't decide whether to keep it on mine because I vary between feeling irritated by its presence and enjoying sorties into the past. L'Archiduchess doesn't like them or so she said in Reaching Nirvana.

Anyway there was a posting popped up I had done about the film The Constant Gardner. Odd, I thought, I don't recall writing that. So I went to the posting. No, I definitely didn't recall that nor the film. Not a scene, not a quote, nothing at all. I had ended the posting with the statement that I wouldn't be watching the film again. Well I may have said that in error. Perhaps I will if for no other reason than to find out what on earth it was that I forgot!

Memories Covered With Dust

Scriptor Senex blogged on Scanning yesterday.   Simply Heather made a comment that the photos brought back to her "memories ....covered with dust in my mind".   What an absolutely wonderful expression.  Sometimes something will jump up, hit you between the eyes and say "Look at me". For me, this is one of those things.