It has been a long week, and I find myself fatigued and not wanting to write. However, for the sake of discipline and consistency, I am forcing myself to write something for the blog today.
So let’s work through some writing prompts which interest me and see where we get to…
A memory of bread and butter…
The first thing that comes to mind is being at my Grandma and Grandpa’s old house in Derby. That house was a beautiful place. I always remember there was so much light streaming into the rooms, polished wooden tables, chairs, stairs and cabinets and a delicious smell always seemed to be wafting from the kitchen – coffee, cake, roast dinner, home-made bread…
My Grandpa had a hobby of making his own bread and I remember the whirring of the mixer when I would walk past the kitchen. I don’t remember specifics, but he would start making the bread in the morning and it would bake and rise throughout the day until there was a perfect rounded loaf on the kitchen counter top.
Sometimes when my mum and I would visit, there would already be bread ready to go. Another one of my Grandpa’s creations for us to try. He experimented with all sorts of seeds, spices, herbs and flavours, adding them to the bread to see what culinary creation he would come up with next.
I loved toast at my Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We always had to sit at the dining room table on the glossy mahogany chairs. Plates with butter knives were set on the table, condiments like home-made jam, marmalade and marmite were placed out and there was always a butter dish in the middle which had its own special lid.
My choice was always butter and marmite. It was so satisfying to see how the butter would melt onto the warm toast covering it in a sheen, then I would sparingly add the marmite for that perfect savoury hit. There were always the obligatory cups of tea on the table, collected onto a handy serving tray. The cups were small and understated, a light shade of brown on the outside and white on the inside, resting snugly in their saucers.
A breakfast of champions…
A hill you once knew…
There will be people who will know exactly where I’m going to go with this… So let’s go there.
The location is Morfa Bychan (More-fa Buck-en), North Wales and the beach is Black Rock Sands. I loved the beach as a child and there was one special spot which I laid my claim to. The Big Hill. Now, to the average adult this is no more than a regular sized sand dune but considering I could only have been 5 or 6 years old and a rather small child (I’m still only 5’ 2” as an adult) that sand dune was immediately named The Big Hill.
The Big Hill was right next to an exit off the beach we would take after a long day of running into the water and making sandcastles. It was probably my way of delaying the inevitable end to the fun beach days, so upon seeing The Big Hill I would begin climbing, my hands and feet sinking into the soft sand as I made my ascent. I would make it to the peak and come barrelling down, laughter and screeching filling the air. This would continue for a few rounds until I would get the call from the adults that we had to leave and that we could come back the next day.
I think I remember there were several people who joined in with The Big Hill over the years. Parents potentially, my cousins and other friends would join in the action, all of us climbing to the top, then clumsily running down, our legs sinking into the softer sand as we charged to the bottom.
I hope other children find joy in its simplicity but I also wonder if it is still there or if over time it has been reshaped by the winds coming from the ocean. Nonetheless, it is for sure The Big Hill I once knew.
A moment in a library…
I love the quiet peace of a library, exploring it’s winding corridors adorned with books on every topic you could think of. It feels like I have special time to myself, away from responsibilities and my ‘to do’ list. I don’t have time to visit libraries these days on a whim because my life is cluttered with a myriad of other things, but I do have fond memories of being younger and finding solace within the walls of libraries.
There are two libraries I remember spending a lot of time in during University, they were the campus library and another library in the city called the John Rylands Library. I remember moments from the campus library sitting in the study spaces surrounded by other hard-working students, pens scratching, keyboards clicking, hushed whispers and pages flipping.
I have flashes from various locations – walking between old book shelves looking for what I needed, trying to figure out how to scan and print pages from PDFs my lecturers had sent me, sitting in front of long windows reading and getting distracted by students outside and the juxtaposition of the architecture and interior design ranging from huge open-space rooms with wooden floors and walls lined with books, to cramped corridors with metal bookshelves and fuse boxes popping out of the wall, just to check if you were watching where you were going.
The John Rylands Library was slightly less chaotic as it is a public library and has to have some semblance of order. The JRL is old. It escapes me how old it actually is but it is an old building. I remember walking around special exhibitions they would hold, something different to uncover within each room. Always walking past an old printing press from back in the day and trying to figure out the labyrinth of steps and corridors I had to walk down to get to the reading room.
The reading room was my favourite. A long, high ceilinged room with books all along the walls. They had statues at certain places throughout the room to commemorate people who had special importance to the library and there was a certain reverence expected of you when you were in there. It seemed more like a museum, which is why I always found it odd that people actually went to study there with their laptops, but it was a library after all.
At the far end of the reading room there was a cylindrical shaped glass case mounted onto the wall, containing the oldest books displayed to the public. I always tried to find the book which had the oldest date embossed onto the spine. I think I managed to find something from the 1400’s or the 1500’s at one point but it always blew my mind how old they were. They would probably disintegrate if they were taken out of the glass case they were in.
More memories are coming to me of another library I have spent some time in, appropriately titled Central Library. This also has a reading room, but it is circular in shape and looks like something out of Harry Potter…
Anyway, I could go on about libraries and how much I like spending time in them but we are at the end of the writing exercise. A pretty successful one if you ask me. I got a lot more down than I was in the mood for and I hoped you enjoyed this little something different for today.
The Mind Library 
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