55) When I was young

 When I was young, about six or seven I should imagine my cousins came to stay often. Their mother, my mother’s sister Elfina was not well and the boys Paul, Laurence and Eric spent quite a lot of time with us.One day my cousin Paul, who was a couple of years older than I was, fell and scuffed his knee. I remember the terrible fuss that he made. I remember that my mother responded by making an equally big fuss over him. She got him inside, gently cleaned the wound, gave him a sweet and sat him in a chair beside the fire to have his tea with his leg up on a chair with a pillow under it.I was incensed, a few days previously I had had what I thought was a much bigger accident, with lots of real blood and the only treatment I got was to have it cleaned with iodine. I wonder if any of you remember how much iodine used to sting. Mom had just put a sticky plaster on it and sent me out to play again. I still had the scar to prove it, in fact I bore that scar for many years. When I protested to my Mom that this was surely unfair treatment she excused her behaviour by saying that as Paul’s mother was very sick we should be extra kind to him and after all he was a boy and we all knew how boys were such sissies when it came to a little bit of pain. I often wonder how much this incident has influenced my attitude to ‘Woman’s Rights’. I am a firm believer that woman should have the vote, be allowed to own their own property, have equal pay for equal work and not be treated as possessions but I am not sure that I want equality with men. I think women are far superior to men and it should stay that way. But of course to get men to do all the heavy lifting and labouring we need to appeal to their egos and butter them up and let them think that they are really in charge. Seriously though I often wonder why women are so determined to be treated the same way as men are. We are different and I think we should be celebrating our differences and making the most of them.

Christmas Lights

Just a few more days and it will be Christmas once again. A practise that is common in Australia that I have not seen anywhere else is the custom of decorating ones house and garden with hundreds of coloured lights. They really go for it in a big way here. The decorations range from a couple of lights or a string of tinsel festooning one of the trees in the garden to very elaborate and I should imagine very costly displays.

Our local paper even publishes a list and a map of the best of the decorations so that parents can take the children on a tour of all the lights before Christmas. Some of the householders have been putting up their displays for many years. They started as just a small token but have been added to each year and now rival New York’s Time Square or London’s Oxford Street.

The imagination and ingenuity is amazing. There are lights everywhere – along the roof, up and down the walls, in the trees, on the driveway, the gate and the chimney. If the house has a chimney one can be pretty sure that there will be a huge blow up Father Christmas climbing into it. Or sometimes going in head first with his black boots sticking up into the air. Another popular feature is the sleigh and all the reindeers – these can be bought in the shops- wire frames in the shape of the sleigh and reindeers with coloured lights attached to them. Some have a series of lights that flash on and off so that the reindeers’ legs appear to be moving and one can see them galloping along the roof top. The shops also sell Nativity scenes, snowmen, Santa’s little elves, fairies, stars, letters that spell out “Merry Christmas”, wishing wells and loads of other things to delight the heart of the dedicated decorator. These displays must be very time consuming to erect and must cost a great deal of money besides the cost of the electricity it must take to power it all. I can’t help feeling a little concerned about the sanity of people who are so dedicated to this time and money consuming pastime.

There are competitions for the best but I have no idea how they are judged, it would be very hard to pick the winners. Many of them have figures that move, maybe snowmen that sing or reindeers that Jingle their bells. If you would like to see some of the winning entries go to
http://express-advocate-gosford.whereilive.com.au/photos/gallery/show-us-your-lights-winners/

I like to go and look but I am more interested in the looks on the faces of the little children as the lights flash and sparkle and they see all their favourite Christmas characters depicted and I feel a nice warm Christmassy feeling towards all the people who put so much effort into bringing such delight to the children. Merry Christmas and God’s richest blessings to them all.


And to you too.

A Very Happy Christmas from

Marina

Spanish Sailors

 Last week I heard someone on the radio talking about the West Coast of Ireland, he talked about the most westerly point and how legend has it that Spanish sailors from the Armada came ashore there and that they are responsible for the many olive skinned beauties in the area. This snippet reminded me of a funny incident with my mother.

Once we were talking about surnames and their origins. She told us that in Cornwall there were many Spanish sounding names and she said that she had read that it was because many of the Spanish sailors from the great Spanish Armada had come ashore in Cornwall and for reasons best known to themselves they had decided to settle there. They married local girls and their off spring still carried these Spanish names. A few days later when we were all in our living room Mom walked in and said, without any preamble “Talking of Spanish Sailors” It took us girls a moment or two to remember that we had been ‘talking of Spanish Sailors’ but when we did we just burst out laughing. Mom was a bit put out that we had laughed and said “Well we were talking of Spanish Sailors” and we just laughed all the more and said “Yes but that was three days ago”. So in our house the phrase is still used. If you want to change the topic of conversation completely and talk about something different you just have to say “Talking of Spanish Sailors” before you start and then everyone knows that you are going to turn the conversation and it will not matter if no one has any idea why you are doing so.

I can’t find any reference to Spanish Sailors in Cornwall but I have found out that after the Spaniards had been defeated by Sir Frances Drake the remaining ships had to sail north and around Scotland as the English fleet were blocking the English channel and they could not get back to Spain that way. Off the coast of Scotland they were hit by a terrible storm and the few remaining ships sailed on around the north of Ireland and are said to have landed south of Galway in a place that is still called Armada Island. As the Spaniards were Catholics they hoped to receive help from Catholic Ireland in their fight against Protestant England but the Irish saw them as intruders and fought them off.

But I suppose with a fleet of 130 ships there must have been a huge number of Spanish Sailors and some of them could have deserted their posts and made new lives for themselves in Cornwall or Ireland. My Mom was always fascinated by surnames, she liked to look at the local telephone directory whenever she came to visit us and try to work out where the people in that area had come from.