dads and pets service - part 2

feeding the guinea pigs

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.

Fathers' Day