Rock buns, china egg cups, and home-made marmalade on Letheringsett wholemeal bread. Scarlet runners, garden peas, and fresh-dug potatoes with butter and mint. Stilton with pears, crumbly cheddar with a sharp apple. Barley sugar, liquorice, and treacle tart. Rhubarb and custard. Salt and vinegar crisps.
Curry leaves, cumin seeds, masala dosa.
Fray Bentos tins, twist-off Cherry Blossom polish, Colman’s ground mustard, sardine cans with a key. Tartan thermos flasks and Primus stoves, tea from plastic mugs by country gates.
Pencil boxes, pencil shavings. Paintboxes. Milky glass marbles and ball bearings. Buckets and spades. Folding clasp knives — Wooden boxes, cotton reels, lead nails, black glass buttons.
Pillar boxes, rotary dials. Airmail letters, triangular stamps. Morris Minor Travellers. Dinky toys, milk churns on station platforms. Coal delivery, steam. Porters with whistles, carriage doors with leather straps, bus conductors.
Deck chairs, shelters on the seafront, yellow gorse, and bladderwrack. Fish and chips with malt vinegar. Building sandcastles in a race against the tide, and fat raindrops on a hot August pavement. The smell of bacon on a campsite, wild garlic, and dried orange peel burning. Cheese and pickle sandwiches eaten outside in winter. Salt on the skin after bathing in the sea. Frozen furrows in a ploughed field in winter. Hedgehogs in the garden and blue tits pecking through the foil-topped milk bottle on the back step. Wellington boots and stamping in puddles. Dubbined leather.
Pine cones, horse chestnut trees, hedges with blackberries, and garden sheds. Snowdrops, bluebells, foxgloves, and the smell of wallflowers — conkers on string. Cowslips in the grass, the scent of the hay. Sheep on unfenced fells. Dry stone walls, and one-inch Ordnance Survey maps. The view of the downs, stone circles, earthworks. Wind driven spume from Atlantic rollers A thunderclap in a snowstorm, a path through a wheat-field.
Old Penguin book covers. Emil and the Detectives and The Thirty-Nine Steps. Poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson. Essays by George Orwell. Novels by Jane Austen. Great War diaries and memoirs. Artwork by Eric Ravilious, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Eardley, Turner, Manet, and …so many. Antoine Doinel and The 400 Blows. Old bookshops and market stalls.
Ginger beer shandy in a shaded pub garden on a hot day. Bizet’s Pearl Fishers’ Duet, played by a brass band with euphonium tenors. We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again on the wireless. The song of a lark, the call of the curlew, the cry of the loon. Listen with Mother, Take it from Here, Paul Temple, The Saturday Club, Hancock, Beyond our Ken, Monty Python, A Book at Bedtime, Radio Luxembourg late at night.
Afternoon naps. Tired legs from long walks. The curl of the cat on the bed. Being alone with only the wood pigeons. A nice cup of tea.
