The day shift left their boots by the fireplace to warm, for their brothers to wear the following morning. After washing in front of the fire, the men were ready for a substantial meal with a large portion of potatoes. Mammy was an excellent cook and made traditional Welsh meals, Lava bread and Bara Brith.
I pass back through clusters of wild flowers in pastel shades. The scene is reminiscent of a small Church, decorated for a wedding as my daughter’s had been.
At Play On Words, we believe that the stories we tell reveal truths we may not have recognized otherwise. That’s why we were drawn to Selma Tufail’s “Self-Portrait,” an excerpt of a memoir-in-progress that she is writing with her sister (and fellow Playonwordsian) Anniqua Rana.
Much has been written about Charles, twenty years older than Ms. Liddell, and his relationship with the little girl. Did he feel any pangs of tender passion, romantic attachment or an aberrant sexual attraction to the little girl, or was it all innocent and pure, merely a platonic fondness with which he was drawn to the little girl on an entirely spiritual plane?
I think Tess of the d’Urbervilles is to the English, what Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is to the French and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is to the Russians – themes of sexual encounters, challenge to societal norms, infidelity, carnal desires and passion.
But those thoughts can wait. I have other more important decisions to consider. So many ice cream flavors. Which one do I not choose? And at tea time, Battenberg cake. For Sunday lunch shepherd’s pie. Fish and chips served in newspapers with vinegar drizzled all over.
Children have a mind that has not yet been indelibly marked by the world they live in. This is what fascinates me when I talk to them. They come up with fearless new proposals while older brains – like mine- tend to go with tried and tested designs, calling the process “experience”. When I look back at some of my own youthful experiments with art and creativity, I smile – or laugh. What I wouldn’t give to return to the innocence of my childhood, to the time I believed I was a misunderstood artist.
If you are reading this, you are familiar with the magical world one enters when a storyteller carries the reader to a place where arbitrary time and place intersect seamlessly.… Read more Discovering the magical worlds of words: Learning to read →
