Wagon Wheels

I am now nursing a heavy cold, but feel much better than yesterday.  The coughing has subsided dramatically, so, Jessie, I probably won’t revisit the surgery where Prof. Lyon-Maris predicted what I’ve got on the 15th of last month.  His student was permitted to stick a needle into my arm and inject an anti-flu fluid substance.  As I departed I quipped that at least I wouldn’t get flu.  He replied that I would not acquire influenza, but I could contract ‘colloquial flu’.  ‘What’s that?’, I asked.  ‘A heavy cold’, was the answer.  Being a man, I suppose he couldn’t use the term which his female tutee may have preferred.  For those not in the know, that’s ‘man flu’, which would actually only be a very mild cold.

I amused myself looking back over the posts I made before Becky taught me how to make links.  I usually manage one or two a day, and have now reached mid-August last year. There is only one existing studio portrait of Chris and me as small children.  This, number 30 in the ‘through the ages’ series, was probably taken in Wimbledon just prior to our being let loose on the Victory Street Party described on 19th October.  We are wearing these marvellous little outfits in the party photograph.  Mum would have been proud of both her boys and her dressmaking skills.

I have mentioned before that Chris’s grandson, James Arrondelle, looks exactly like my brother as a child.  Just to prove my point, I nicked the attached photograph of the little chap with his father Paul from Paul’s Facebook pages.

In referring back to that Carshalton street party, I was reminded that the home of my Auntie Vic and Uncle Bill and their four children, in that same suburb, was a post war house in Victory Avenue.  Theirs was one of the first gardens I tilled, back in the 1950s, but it is only now that I realise the origin of the street name.

It seemed sensible today to stay indoors and take it comparatively easy.  My ramblings were therefore done in the house where the dressing gown did sterling duty.

We dined on Jackie’s superb steak pie topped with pastry leaves and berries decorating the crust.  An array of vegetables complemented the dish, and I complimented the chef.  My dessert was rice pudding and jam, good nursery food for an invalid.  Jackie’s was a Wagon Wheel.  We are today obsessed with making everything smaller, from mobile phones to static homes.  Reducing the size of these confectionery chocolate coated biscuits seems quite out of order to me.  I think Trading Standards should pay the makers a visit.  They have, of course, denied any reduction in size, claiming that adult memories have enhanced the size of the treat held in their younger hands. There is an interesting debate being conducted on Google, and Wikipedia claim to have the definitive answer.

I finished the Roc des Chevaliers.