Bottles

On my first post of 18th March I mentioned a lady who had more trust, in her case in bottles, than I did. Since then two snippets have come to mind.

The first concerned a chap from the wild fens of Lincolnshire where life, at that time, was hard. Hard enough that the life is now mainly lived by people from eastern Europe who are still used to it. So he joined the army as a long service man, ending up as a sergeant major and meeting us not long after his retirement. He told a story about his elder son which went roughly as follows. He would play with his son most evenings, play which involved a certain amount of rough and tumble. Play which sometimes involved the son, at the time an infant, jumping off the kitchen table to be caught by doting father. Then, one evening, he did not catch the jumping son, who crashed to the ground and started screaming, although probably with more hurt to mind than to body. That will teach you, said dad, never to trust anyone. Always rely on yourself, not on others. A lesson which might, for all I know, have sunk in, and which presumably reflected the wild life of the fens and the nearly as wild life of the army. A story which he subsequently told us without bravado, embarrassment or anything else. He thought that he had done the right thing.

The second concerned myself, also at the time an infant, but an infant already fond of food (oral satisfaction?) in general and sausages in particular. So my mother, who was a teacher but who was on this occasion in prank mode rather than lesson mode, thought she would play an April Fool trick on me. With much palaver she announced that it was sausages for lunch. She built up to sausages for lunch all through the morning and I drank it all up. Much pleasurable anticipation of sausages. Finally, lunch arrived. Sausages arrived in a splendid covered dish, the sort of thing which one might more usually use to serve cabbage or soup. Lid lifted off with great ceremony to reveal nothing inside; there were no sausages for lunch. I burst into tears, got into a bit of a state and generally made a great fuss. My mother's joke had been much more successful than she had expected and I was eventually soothed, I imagine, with promise of sausages to come the next day.

Thinking now of both stories together, did the second result in less trust in the world than there might otherwise have been? Did the lady who left her bottles behind the road sign have no such story in her background?

Thinking which was followed by two items from Sainsbury's. The first was some free-from yoghourt which BH included in her lunch. Said to be free from both fat and sugar but with a hint of lemon and lime. Not clear at all how you make white stuff looking a bit like whipped cream on this basis, but there you are, the trick had been pulled off. The second, rather later, over DVD, was a petit chablis, not grand enough to be a chablis pure and simple, but, instead, also coming with a hint of lemon and lime. Altogether, after account is taken of the breakfast orange, also from Sainsbury's, the day of the citrus.

The DVD was another hand-me-down from Surrey Libraries (see http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/people-and-community/libraries) called 'Salvation Boulevard', starring, amongst others, a rather podgy looking Pierce Brosnan. Rather an odd and creaky film, but quite funny and welcome relief from a near exclusive diet of ITV3 and its advertisements for denture fixatives. Then checking this morning, I find that the New York Times, according to Wikipedia, had a fit of the Guardians about it and said that 'there is the inkling of a strong, interesting idea here, about how some versions of modern religion are predicated on the systematic denial of reality, but Salvation Boulevard is itself too loosely tethered to the actual world to make the point with the necessary vigor or acuity'.