11may2017

On the same day

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ Leave a comment
old-2237947_960_720.jpg
Photo at Pixabay

Blur of blue, green and – mainly – orange. Familiar whistling, unfamiliar ratchet being tugged, clanking, several times, followed by coughing sounds, more whistling, humming and whirring, coming and going. All topped by a clean fresh scent on the air that I’ve loved ever since.

Pale blue, white, and grey. Solid. Heavy. Handsome. Noble addition – even if the large hook was disconcerting and responsible for small-boy nightmares about a certain infamous pirate. More whirring and clanking. Like a wooden mallet inviting a bell.

On the same day: Dad’s first petrol-driven Flymo. And Mum drove a brand new Kenwood Chef.

Simon Marsh

A memory palace of sorts

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ Leave a comment
Reference&Circ area 1970's.jpg
Photo at Evergreen

Thoughts become words and words become sentences. Sentences become books and books become a library.

In our town it lay quietly behind the post office and slowly became my second home.

Familiarity with its shelves became a Dewey decimalised memory palace of sorts. Later libraries fuelled flames of rich possibility.

Insidiously, perniciously, they are being inexorably, uncaringly closed. The shallow suburban avarice and deadening, uncalloused hands of our politicians knowingly engineer these crimes.

Our men and women of Westminster, epitomising Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men‘, steadily unpick the delicate fragments shored against our culture’s ruin in the name of their bleak austerity.

Colin Dixon

We weren’t invited

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ Leave a comment
1572908.jpg
Photo at Ship Spotting

A gold rimmed invitation asked Mr and Mrs Johnson to visit the Queen on Her Majesty’s Yacht Britannia. Replies to Kuala Lumpur please. It was quite clear my brother and I were not invited.

Mother wore a long dress and white gloves. Father bought a suit and tie.

They left us standing on Kuching’s waterfront, waving our homemade Union Jacks amid a sea of blue uniformed schoolgirls.

But we went for lemonade and ice cream afterwards, with other undesirable missionary children, and agreed, on balance, that we had had the better time of it.

Cathy Johnson 

The Onion Shed

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ Leave a comment

45414.jpg

Don’t get me wrong – dry days were fun. We went beach-combing for jerry-cans, glass buoys and cowrie shells. We slashed paths through the woods with scythes.

But wet days were glorious. We holed up in Granny’s onion shed, oblivious to the rain teeming down outside, playing shove-ha’penny with green-stained tuppence bits. We painstakingly decorated empty wooden boxes, her monthly order of Turkish cigarettes from Fortnum and Masons. Tiny brass hinges yawned open and inside the crumpled tissue paper breathed camels and spices, deserts, weathered dark faces and hot dusty leather, and stole you away to another world.

Kit Hollings

Wealth

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ 1 Comment

The wealth of nations is such a resonant phrase yet so difficult to define. There is the material wealth which can be defined as assets, incomings and outgoings. More interesting to me is the spiritual and cultural assets of a nation. Some years ago I spent twelve days at Tashi Lhunpo monastery in the Indian state of Karnataka. The Indian Government had given an area of land on which were five Tibetan monasteries and a Tibetan village, all of them refugees from Tibet seeking to preserve their culture. The Tibetan, Ladhaki and Nepalese men and boys in Tashi Lhunpo monastery were the sanest, happiest and most generous community I have ever encountered. Yet materially their wealth was utterly meagre.

Colin Dixon

Timeless Island

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ Leave a comment

Screenshot 2017-04-06 17.11.38

Do you remember an island?
White sand extending into infinity
Warm and sensual underfoot
Born in time long since lost
A playground for those
Who choose to cross.

Rocks uplifted by the earth
Scattered across the beaches
Stained with veins of pink and white
Statuesque as each one reaches
To stand atop the highest point.

Anemones, basnade, fish and crab
Twice daily tides abandon
Treasures to nature but
Life giving source to to others
Secrets to find and cherish.

Seaweed tendrils carelessly curl
On the incoming tide.
In sheltered nooks and crannies
Thrifts pink flowers shyly
Nod and stir.

Safe within Iona’s embrace
This timeless scene endures with grace.

Ros White

Wave your hanky

~ mungrisdalewriters ~ Leave a comment
Efraimstochter.jpg
Photo at Pixabay

Most infants owned a Pea Shooter. I remember calling at the small general store opposite our infant school to purchase a halfpenny worth of grey peas, ammunition required urgently for the first playtime break.

With no paper bags until a later delivery, I was happy to improvise and had the peas wrapped carefully into my clean handkerchief.

Our teacher, having noticed most boys using their coat sleeves on which to wipe their noses, had urged us to always carry a clean hanky and it was on this fateful day he requested we prove we had taken his advice.

In my exuberation, I snatched out my lovely clean hanky, without a thought for my recent purchase, to see dozens of my much needed “grey farters” explore the whole of the classroom floor.

Trevor Coleman