Ah! Peace… It’s the tail end of the day, now, and the Summerhouse beckoned me the moment Ann and I got home from the celebrations.
But first things first! Kettle on (for a cuppa) and shorts on / shirt off – it’s been a very muggy day and I need to cool off!
So, for the second time… ah!... peace…
With my cup of tea in hand, I sit in the summerhouse and reflect on this day – Sunday the 8th of August 2010. You know, it still amazes me how quickly the hours fly by. It seems only an hour or two ago that Ann and I were having breakfast and I was setting my ‘SatNav’ to ensure we arrived without a hitch and on time: and now we’re home again, it’s early evening, and the day has gone.
To mis-quote the Sergeant Pepper lyrics, “It was 40 years ago today…” that was Val and Keith’s Wedding Day…
Ann and I had received our invitation to attend my long-time friends, Val and Keith’s, Ruby Wedding Anniversary celebration first at their church for the morning service, and afterwards in the church hall for a buffet lunch celebration.
Naturally, having known them for well over forty years, and been at their wedding – on this day, forty years ago – I was not going to miss this “knees-up”, uh-hum, sorry, “bless-up”! So we set the ‘sat-nav’ to make sure we found the way to their church in time for the start, and left with plenty of time to get there.
A fine morning, and we made it in good time. A simple, family service, with plenty of fun, an “interview” of the celebrating couple – how had they survived 40 years? What were the worst times and what the best? And then a buffet lunch where the amount of food – and all splendidly displayed – could have fed their village for a week!
Lots of folks to chat to, many new people to meet, and several whom we had not seen for many long years, and then it was home time, and we’d hardly had time to chat to Val and Keith – even if we could have got to them in the melee of their many friends who equally wanted to chat.
So now here I am, sitting in my summerhouse, quietly reflecting on this day, and on the forty years since I stood watching Val and Keith get married. Yes, that’s a long time to reflect on! And age has destroyed many of the memories from those intervening years, but seeing the wedding photos, shown to us as a slide show after lunch, and now remembering back to “the Sixties”, and to their wedding day (this day) in 1970… oh dear, I seem to be getting all maudlin!
But it’s strange, a few black and white photos can trigger more memories than just asking “what do you remember about…?” There was the time when I first met Val: must have been summer 1965, when we were both on college vacation, and working at Whipsnade Zoo, in the Hall Farm Restaurant. And then that same year, at Christmas vacation, working for the Post Office, as it still was then; the Royal Mail, as it became. We worked together doing the Christmas parcel post, which was delivered using a big old ‘pantechnicon’ lorry (a furniture removal lorry), where all us college students would be standing inside the van-body, sorting the parcels as we were driven along, and a couple of us would run behind the lorry’s tailboard, which was lowered on chains so the lads and lassies inside could throw out a parcel to the “runners”, who would run to the address and deliver the parcel, then run back to the moving lorry to collect another! Can you imagine what Health and Safety Officers would say to that today! They’d have an apoplectic fit! And it was icy on the roads, some days, and we worked until well after dark to get the parcels in the lorry all delivered before we all went back to the sorting office. Fun times. 
And now Val and Keith have celebrated forty years of married life, raised two strapping-great sons, and have grandchildren and grey hair, but also many, many, memories. Not just of the Sixties and Seventies, but four (plus) decades of memories!
Happy Ruby Wedding Anniversary, Val and Keith! And may you have many more!
One of my pet ‘hates’ is when you buy something that appears to be “more than”, (to utilise one of the advertising catch-phrases that I like so much), only to discover that it’s “no better than” a cheaper – "less-than" – product!
Like the words “less fat”, “only natural ingredients”, “organic”, “farm produced”, “natural goodness”, and all the other marketing phrases, the word “Stoneground”, (as in bread), seems to conjure up all the natural goodness of a country loaf, but it’s no more than a marketeer’s bait to catch the “Au natural” brigade!
Last week, on our customary Friday afternoon foray to one of the grocery supermarkets here in Milton Keynes, I found I was too late to get my usual sliced, wholemeal loaf as they'd sold out of the one I usually buy. So, after spending far too long debating whether to buy a different variety, one I hadn't tried before, I saw a bargain! It was the supermarket’s own-brand 'Stoneground Wholemeal' sliced loaf at a 'special' price, and the same price as I normally pay for their ‘ordinary’ wholemeal sliced! So, no contest!“Stoneground” equals “more than”, doesn't it? Well, the health-food adverts are always playing up the ‘goodness’ of stoneground flour over ‘normal’ flour… so into my trolley went that loaf!
Now, I've eaten home-made sandwiches, (henceforth called “sarnies”, because that’s the colloquialism I always use), for the past 40+ years for my work-a-day pack-up. They're always hand-made by yours truly, and fresh-made every evening, 5 days a week – bar holidays – and for the past several years using wholemeal bread. So I rather think I know sliced bread - especially wholemeal.
As I took this loaf out of the fridge on Sunday evening to make my sarnies, I was really looking forward to a delicious new taste at the start of the new working week. Having been “forced” into the purchase of this stoneground loaf, I was anticipating all the goodness from the wheatfield, milled by hand in a little country windmill... oh how the adverts can suspend reality, eh?!
But, like a wine connoisseur, I opened the plastic bag and smelled the aroma of this “more than” loaf! “Wow, this is going to be good”, I thought as I took out four slices. But as they lay on the kitchen worktop, those slices didn't look any different at all to my usual 'ordinary' wholemeal loaf!What? I looked at the bag again to satisfy myself that it definitely said “Stoneground” – and it did! What's more, equally 'as usual', as I spread my cholesterol-busting, (and grotty tasting), margarine ever so thinly onto the slices, they also tore just as easily as the butter knife slid across the slice and the margarine snagged the soft bread slice. Just as my usual brand of ordinary wholemeal does! “I've been had!” I said aloud. "It ain't no better at all!"
When Ann and I visited an ancient, but working, watermill, one holiday in Devon, and saw the differences between the types of flour, one of things which stood out was the ‘grit’ in stoneground flour. I understand that ‘normal’ flour is milled with steel rollers, not with huge, stone, millstones, as our forefathers did. Therefore, your ‘ordinary’ bakers loaf, (whether a local baker, supermarket baked, or produced by the million by Kingsmill or Warburtons, etc.), won’t have that grit in it that naturally comes off the stone millstones when they turn against each other. So I was expecting ‘grit’, as well as more of the chaff from the wheat, in this supermarket own-brand ‘stoneground’ loaf… not a bit of it! No grit, no chaff, nothing at all which said "stoneground", and it was as tasteless as the cheapo brands sold as "value" loaves. What a con! It was just as well I only paid the same money as for my usual bread. Stoneground… Ha! So be warned, “more than” might not be anything “more than” a fancy wrapper!As it says on many advertising boards “Buyer Beware!”
