I am so ready for some warmth and sunshine and I bet you are too. When it gets to this time of year my patience wears thin and I want to be able to go outside and not get wet, blown away or frozen. That’s not too much to ask is it? Today’s blog is chatter from Chrissie’s world, because the other morning I decided to have a bath in coffee, yes coffee.
As my bedroom is just across the hall I took a cup of coffee back to bed with me to have five minutes cross-wording before I got up. Anyway as you may or may not know, I have had a spot of bother with my tooth this last couple of weeks. As I’ve said, it has been soooo painful. So dozy me picked up my cup full of coffee and held it to my cheek where the pain was.
A coffee bed-bath
I realised after the event that it wasn’t the right thing to do, because as I did it, the coffee slurped over and down my arm, which was covered with my bed jacket. Well it does get cold when you are sat up in bed all hours. You would have thought the sleeve was a funnel, as the coffee poured its way down my arm and to goodness knows where. Some went on the bedding, but not as much as went down my sleeve. Really, it was hilarious, as it was so neatly done, like poetry in motion. You’d have thought I’d done it on purpose as it was so neat and tidy.
Of course I sprang up and ran to the kitchen with my very soggy arm and nightie to get cleaned up. It felt horrible, all sticky and very, very wet. I’m still sniggering to myself about it now as it was so funny. I would have loved to have seen my face as the coffee poured down my sleeve, it was priceless. I bet I couldn’t do that again if I tried. At least I funnelled it where it was easier to clean up, looking on the bright side that is!
Cider with Rosie
Anyway, I’ve just been looking on a Facebook group from my old town and they were having a walk down memory lane, which I found very interesting. There were pictures of walks that I went on many times, as our town was next to country, farms and all the rest. A short walk anywhere and you were in fields, woods or whatever.
This particular post was of a lane with a bridge over it that you walked under, always known as ‘convicts tunnel’. Folklore said that it was convicts that built it, although if they did where they came from I don’t know, as there weren’t any prisons near to us. Having said that, there were all kinds of messages in the concrete and stone, presumably written by the men as they worked on it. It did used to give me the creeps, I must say.
There was a colliery just in front of the woods where I spent many a happy hour. In the woods that is, not the mine! If you walked for another five or ten minutes it took you to what used to be a tiny hamlet, a small collection of houses surrounded by countryside, and that’s where my grandma was born. It was called Smithley if my memory serves me well. When I used to pass it through the fields, it reminded me of ‘Cider with Rosie’ as it had exactly the same feel of days gone by.
Climb every mountain
Before you actually got to the fields, virtually touching on the countryside, was where all the dust and slag was dumped from the mines. You ended up with what looked like black mountains of coal waste, dusty and very dirty, as you can imagine. My cousin and I would go there and climb the ‘mountain’ through the various paths that had formed over time, even though my cousin had been told not to go there.
It was a very lonely place to be as there was nothing round it but fields and silence. When I look back now it was pretty stupid to go ‘mountaineering’ on what was scree. For a start it could have come down on us and buried us, and another thing, we could have been abducted! At the tender age of 10 or 11 things like that never occurred to us. We were from the generation where children could be playing out for hours at a time. If my daughter had wandered about like me and my friends did, I would have gone mad. I always made sure I knew where she was, what time she was due back and all the rest that parents did.
Happy childhood days
My brother, who was five years older than me, would be out most of the day. There were no questions asked. But that’s what kids did in those days of not having to be scared witless by murders and all the other horrible things that go on today.
It was a happy childhood in that way, but awful in others, which is another story for another day maybe. I’m glad neither my daughter or me were chained to a computer, phone or iPad like kids are today. They are missing out on so much of childhood because as we know, you never get those years back. The freedom and carefree times, playing out with your friends. What a shame.
While you’re here…
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