Category Archives: High Ham and Somerset

Having one’s chips

For the fainthearted . . .

Our son’s 23rd birthday – a bag filled with food from the Chinese takeaway – the smell of chips merging with the scent of turf smoke on a damp October evening. The neural network connects the aroma with long term memory. Chips went with special occasions.

An August evening outing to Charmouth, three or four cars filled with family members going to walk on the beach of the seaside town; an amble down the riverbank before reaching the sea. Chips in newspaper being the treat at the end of the …

Small boy memories

For the fainthearted . . .

Perhaps it was part of a story Miss Rabbage read to us in the junior class at primary school, perhaps it was from one of the worthy programmes that the BBC would screen during Children’s Hour; it was hardly a story I would have chosen to read for myself. Only the beginning of the story remains in the memory, and the details are so scant that no Internet search has produced any suggestion of what the title of the story might have been, let alone who might have been its …

The eve of school

For the fainthearted . . .

This evening was the puddle-jumping anniversary. The puddle was across the road from our house at the edge of a little Somerset village. Cars and tractors would swing wide to turn into or out of the lane that ran beside our garden and, as they did so, would cut into the verge opposite the house. The big agricultural tyres would cut deep into the soil, leaving a hard packed rut. When heavy rain came, as it always did, there would be a deep puddle, the width of a tractor tyre …

Harvest days

For the fainthearted . . .

The Irish Farmers’ Journal calendar picture for August has about it a joy and a melancholy. The dog leaping in delight among the ripened grain evoking August days of youth: an uncle’s spaniel following the harvester in anticipation of rabbits breaking cover, the scent of tractor exhaust, the feel of hessian sacks,  shouts and laughter of men gathered for the day.

The harvest moon filling the Laois sky this evening called attention to the fact the summer was dying, that in the cheer of the harvest there was the gloom …

Turning again

For the fainthearted . . .

It happened again this year. Despite the earnest wishes expressed every year for more than 40 years, every year it happens  – the days start to get shorter on 22nd June and two days later Midsummer’s Day is reached.

There is a vivid recollection of a lunchtime conversation at High Ham Primary School in 1969 or 1970.

“It’s drizzling”.

“Who’s drizzling?”

“The weather”, I said, “it’s drizzling”.

The school dinner lady sat looking out from the dinner room, watching us through the double glass doors that opened onto the playground.…

Railway escape

For the fainthearted . . .

An excellent day that included riding on the Waterford and Suir Valley Railway. Travelling along the banks of the wide Suir in the warmth of June sunshine, there was again cause to ask what it was about railways that created such a sense of inner well-being.

Why have railways always had a special fascination, even for someone who knows nothing about engines or engineering?Maybe they represent an ordered world, a safe world structured by timetables. Maybe they were from a world where people were still courteous and the country had …