A MARMALADE SANDWICH WITH PADDINGTON
This morning the air has been blown to freshness by the strong winds, and I love alt text’s suggestion for this week’s photo: A person sitting on a bench with a bear and a cookie!
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When I heard that a Paddington Bear bench had been installed in Chester I was excited to go and see it. I loved watching the cartoons when I was little and enjoyed the empathy I felt for the little bear as he explored things. Marmalade sandwiches are not really a thing for me – I often eat marmalade on toast, but not in a sandwich. However, it felt a fitting thing to do to make a marmalade sandwich to eat on the bench with Paddington. I took a bite before sitting down so my sandwich matched the shape of his. It was delicious and Kath and I enjoyed sharing it on the way home afterwards. There will be more of these kinds of sandwiches in my days.
Last week’s photo featured three apples on a wooden Ludo board and after I had taken the photo I thought about the way starting a new business feels like playing a game of Ludo. All the work that is needed to get round to those final steps towards ‘home’. And then still needing to roll the right numbers on the dice. The metaphor of this reminds me to enjoy the journey and that feels like just the right message to give myself at the moment. If you find me walking around saying that Life is like a game of Ludo you will know why. Here’s to those moments in life when you roll a six and get another go. For me this week this has included writing a cv for the first time in many years and taking a moment to celebrate my skills and career journey so far. It was motivational for me to see the document take shape which felt particularly good because when I turned on the laptop to start writing, it felt like a bit of a chore!
I now notice that a large number of my photos feature food. I guess this sort of balances the pictures of things flying in the air or lying on the ground like discarded elastic bands. But I think it might also tell me that I enjoy eating things. In my photo trunk the other day I found a whole collection of food photos that I had printed out and this included some very dubious looking quinoa. I think I was capturing the first time I had made it into a meal, but it wasn’t very photogenic! My ‘Eat the Storms’ photos show the sweet treats that accompany each episode, and I love that they are all different. These do seem to be standing the test of time and are much more pleasing to the eye. This week there was delicious chocolate cake to accompany the celebration of my first poetry collection, Magnifying Glass, being in the world for four years, and my beautiful wife Kath being in it for 51! The four biscuits on the top went a bit soggy and there might have been slightly too much buttercream, but it was delicious! Having found flour mites in the cupboard flour I am determined now to use up the new bag I bought before mites make their way into this bag. Perhaps they just hatch in the flour; I can’t really picture the mites marching into our kitchen and all the way up to the cake ingredients. (And now a little Google tells me that there is a risk I didn’t get rid of them all last time we had them and they might have come from eggs laid in the crevices of the cupboard even though I thought my cleaning was very thorough!)
In honour of ‘Magnifying Glass’ I will share the title poem of the collection:
MAGNIFYING GLASS
Making sure his head does not cast a shadow,
my brother orders me quiet.
Watch, he says,
he has been experimenting for days
with the magnifying glass they bought him.
Now he aims the sun’s rays,
narrowing
intensifying
targeting.
His control is powerful.
Between the far away sky
and us on the ground
he is manipulating light, tightening it.
He burns ants,
trapped in dips in the wood,
setting charcoal circles side by side.
He starts then on newspaper;
the heat bites crescents in the edges
like a hot-jawed leafcutter ant.
Smoke rises, lifting its smell
just before orange tongues elongate
and lap.
Amazingly, it kites up, up,
over our fence into the sky.
I stand beside, yet, behind him
staring up into the space that he loves
and I do not understand.
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