WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT

While out walking we talked about….

Where humans might rest up in a dual purpose horse box;

The anarchy of some computer programme system designs;

About overflowing farm drains;

A courier company that uses more than one livery;

A swollen river in spate and nearly over-topping its banks;

About a utensils pot seen in a charity shop;

Buying a loaf of bread from the local bakery,

As I absent-mindedly walked past it;

Where to find a public toilet;

The cold wintry wind felt like ‘a bed for snow’.

WORKING AROUND CYCLES

A great day for the laundry, we've got a dry one; the washing can blow excessively on the washing line. Most of my time has been spent working around the time schedule of the washing machine programmes. That is substantially different from meditating while watching the laundry cycle round through the porthole of the machine door, which I remember doing years ago, when I regularly used laundrettes. It was even more 'exciting' in the laundrette when your wash load graduated to the tumble drying machines that ate an awful lot of coins in payment for using them. They had bigger doors with a great big porthole. What must my eyes have looked like when I eventually left the premises with my laundered and dried load.

Now, I am working round the drying time. I shall slip away from blog soon, to prepare the evening meal. By the time that is done and all has been eaten, I am very sure that everything pegged out on the line, with extra pegs, will be absolutely battered dry by the fierce mild winds that are currently blasting here. Weighted down with what I will have eaten, I should be well grounded to fight the elements and relieve the rotary drying line of my many washed items. With luck, I'll avoid the rotary drying line from bashing me while I fight to get the washing in the laundry basket.

MEMORIES OF CHILDREN'S PROGRAMMES

Early children's television programmes were full of spoken received English, (previously known as the King's or Queen's English) which the majority of folk did not speak. Thinking back, the BBC 'Listen With Mother' radio slot in the weekday afternoons was equally as plummy and posh. While children probably accepted there was a bunch of chatterers who did not speak not like them, their families and their friends, the important thing was, the programmes were theirs, they belonged to them. It introduced young minds and ears to listening to stories and mini serialisations. The plum speech didn't matter, anyway, you didn't copy their speech patterns, you just learned to understand it....like learning another language!

Television was a similar story, but I think changes in interaction and speech patterns altered marginally quicker than they did with the children's radio programme slot. As we did not have a television in our house, I only saw children's programmes very occasionally. There was, I remember, the odd stripey-dressed puppet Andy Pandy and The Flowerpot Men in monochrome, jumping around inside a small square bottle-bottomed window. I have no idea what he or they did. 

When I became parent myself, I watched the children's programmes on television with the kids. The daily radio children's slots had vanished long ago.  Rosie and Jim,  who were lively-looking squeaky-voiced puppets, appeared on their brightly painted canal barge houseboat; a programme with Tony Robinson,(now the presenter of the archaeological digs T.V Time Team)  who, in those days, sat at a computer and during the programme he would summon the animation shape of  'Wordeee', to demonstrate the sound, the use and the writing of the magic 'e'.  

I watched the whole series of Sesame Street, it was brilliant for teaching young eyes, ears and minds all sorts of useful things, like sign recognition; snippets of various genres of music; titbits about nature and loads of activities. The little parable style stories, beautifully enacted by colourfully dressed animal characters guided by adults from many ethnic backgrounds, introduced children to the real multi-cultural world.