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from me to you - part 2

Dear Sheddists,

today's journey back in time sees us revisit long deceased childhood pets.

I hasten to add the deer I'm pictured with here is not one of them. The photo opposite does, however, feature a cute little animal, albeit one dressed with the sartorial elegance which so distinguished sophisticated child-wear of the 60s.

The khaki-coloured baggy shorts are set off perfectly by a huge fringed cowboy-hat, accessorised with matching toy weaponry - very possibly a miniature sawn-off shotgun by the look of it. The 60s, as you may have gathered already, were most decidedly not a PC decade.

If memory serves me correct, the photo was taken by my father at a petrol-filling station en route to a family holiday in Scotland.  It appeared in a local newspaper, a yellowed clipping from which is to be found somewhere about the House, if I could but locate it.

I digress though, so here's to the question of the day.

What sort of pets did you have when you were young and what were their names?

My mother's pride and joy was the family dog, a phrase I use in the very loosest of senses as Sheba the Yorkshire Terrier took an intense dislike on principle to anyone who came within a self-determined ten yard exclusion zone.


Not the most prepossessing of specimens, Sheba resembled an ill-fitting grey toupee through which could be seen intermittently a set of sharpened and yellowing teeth, usually poised at the ready in an angry grimace.  Her territory was a a green-painted dog box in which she hid all her doggy treasures, the jewel in the crown being a set of mouldy sausages. They were carefully curated by Sheba from breakfasts long-past and amounted to a kind of canine delicatessen charcuterie.

The first pet of my own was a tortoise, the name and sex of which eludes me. However, I do recall taking said tortoise with me on a variety of trips to the local village shops, carried lovingly in an old strawberry punnet. Goodness knows what the local shop-keepers must have made of this!

Next up was Monty, a hamster whose sibling Jimmy accompanied us home from the pet-shop in matching cardboard boxes nestled carefully on the respective laps of my goodself and my younger brother.  They were named in honour of Jim Montgomery, the legendary Sunderland goal-keeper whose brilliant save against Leeds in the 1973 Cup Final secured a historic victory for the Wearsiders.

The life-span of the average hamster is but a short thing so a year or two later we greeted Monty's successor. Dusty was my all-time favourite pet, a lively Agouti guinea pig with a venturing spirit that caused him in due course to make a bee-line for the sanctuary of the most shady and over-grown spot in our back-garden.  He went AWOL and tears were shed.

A replacement was duly purchased at the local pet-shop a week later - Heinz, a small piebald piggie who settled in quickly to Dusty's old cage. And then, joy of joys, Dusty made a dramatic re-appearance on the lawn, seemingly unperturbed by a week's feral voyaging in the lesser traveled reaches of back-garden shrubbery.

The decision was made to put the two together to save on cage-costs and after a certain amount of excitable interplay Dusty and Heinz settled down amicably. A few weeks later we realised our mistake. Heinz was female and now decidedly pregnant! She delivered a delightful litter of piglets and the rest is history.  I remain to this day a guinea pig fancier.

Best regards,

electrofried(mr)

 

villa march on

reaching out

sew cloth together

from me to you - part 1

Dear Sheddists,

a few years ago my eldest daughter bought me a lovely book called, 'Dear Grandad - from me to you.'

In essence, the short tome contains a number of questions for the reader to answer and for a little while now I've been scrawling in its pristine pages.

I am, however, conscious my hand-writing is fast becoming illegible. It was never good at the best of times but fading eyesight means the contents of the book now resemble a sight-seeing tour to the dimly lit hieroglyphics of a lesser-known Egyptian pyramid.

Accordingly I've resolved to type out the more salient passages to add to my blog and this is the first in what I plan to be a continuing series.

What is your name?

My name is Simon. I understand at one point my parents were considering Toby as an alternative. Mercifully (and with apologies to all my friends and acquaintances who go by that name) they stuck to their guns.

So here I am ... Simon.

What colour are your eyes?

Unless I am very much mistaken they were blue last time I looked. Should they change I will let you know.

How tall are you?

I don't do the new-fangled metric thing so in plain English currency I'm six foot and one quarter inch.  I'm very proud of that quarter inch. It means I can boast of being over six foot.

Or at least I think I can.

As the years go by I appear to have metamorphosed by the transfer of inches from height to width.  Should this process continue into later life I confidently predict that by the time I reach one hundred and receive the mandatory Buckingham Palace telegraph I will be a two foot tall and five foot wide.

What are your earliest memories?

My very first memory was learning how to crawl. I'd spotted a spinning-top lodged just out of reach beneath the huge brown side-board in the dining room of the house where I was brought up as a child.


I can remember the pattern on the red carpet, swirling snakes of colour that painted a way toward the object of my desire. The top had a red handle and if I managed to push hard enough it made a little tin train run round a circular track inside its plastic-covered dome. Just to add to the excitement, the train would open and close a set of white railway gates on its journey whilst making a faintly comforting 'woo-woo' noise.

Suffice to say there were no wimpish, bureaucratic EU Health & Safety Regulations in place to ban the use of faintly toxic red-leaded paint or the miscellany of small metal parts secreted within as a tempting choke-hazard reward for curious toddlers.  We were made of sterner stuff in those days.

A few more early memories.  I recall dipping down into the hollowed recesses of a dark wooden writing-desk in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother. This housed a shelved collection of faux leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica of a slightly alarming blood-red shade, the spines of which bore gold-imprinted letters of the alphabet.  A few visits to this secret hiding-place and I had the code cracked - I was ready to read!

One last early memory. The smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen, part of a glorious English breakfast fry-up overseen by my father, Rex. It was one of only two meals I can ever remember him attempting. The other was camp-fire cooked sausage, invariably charcoal coated and dripping excess fat like a sweating pig in a heatwave.

This was, of course, long before calories had been invented and at a time when cholesterol played a major part in the diet of the working man. Little surprise when poor Rex died of a massive coronary at the tender age of 48.