Mini Eggs

There have been some tremendous blogs this past week about tiny toy animals, dolls' houses, miniature vehicles, books and pictures, as well as theories seeking to explain our fondness for all such small things. I disclosed in my comment on one blog that I had a toy farm as a child and I specialised in pigs and piglets of many hues, dozens of them, all free-range on green carpet because pigsties seemed like an unnecessary use of pocket-money. 

However, I'm sensing that you've maybe read enough over previous days about toy farms, model villages and dolls' houses, tiny paintings and little books the size of matchboxes, delightful though they all are. I'm sensing that what you expect from Saturday's Miniatures blog is something about mini eggs. I'm right, aren't I? I've latched onto the fact that Easter must be in the offing, for the shops are stacked full of chocolate eggs of many colours and sizes (though obviously only one shape). Mini eggs it is then.

When my daughters were young, my wife and I in loco lepus pascha (as agents of the Easter Bunny) used to hide a large quantity of foil-covered mini eggs around our house on the night before Easter Sunday - not as nerve-racking as playing Father Christmas. By large quantity I mean fifty, in a variety of colours. We had a three-storey house, so divided the rooms up between us and hid the tiny eggs in all manner of places throughout the house, some easy enough to spot, others requiring serious sleuthing. 

On Easter morning the excited girls would set out on their treasure hunt and when, after an hour or so, they had collected all the eggs they could find, they would divide them up between themselves in fair shares, though neither of them was particularly fond of chocolate - the chase was the thing and it was always such fabulous fun. As they grew older, we were forced to become more ingenious at finding hiding-places and it was a rare event for all fifty eggs to be found, given that we couldn't always remember ourselves all of the hiding-places we'd used.

mini-eggs: some were never found

A few eggs would turn up in the weeks following, when a loo-roll was changed, when a teapot or saucepan was next needed, in a rarely-used coffee cup, when a picture rail was dusted or a window opened or a wellington boot pulled on. Occasionally the renegade egg would be in last year's colours or even the year before. Some few eggs have famously never been found!

Given that I've committed to this mini egg theme, I'm not going to deviate at the oblate end of the blog, and so I've concocted a poem anchored in the 1950s/1960s architectural fashion for 'space-age', space-saving modular houses as depicted in the photograph below, and on the cusp of a social revolution that saw the beat generation slowly morph into hippy. These all-in-one egg shaped pods were envisaged as a stylish solution to the need for low cost, small footprint accommodation, capable of being sited even in challenging terrain, with a minimum of prep for those who wanted to get away from it all, to fantasize perhaps that they were going further.

They looked so much more exciting than the prefab houses of the post-war era or the regimented trailer parks that many Americans were required to call home. Manufactured of steel and/or aluminium, they could be spray-painted any hue the owner wished for, and a cluster or colony of them resembled a clutch of colourful Easter eggs, even more enchanting when they were all lit up at night.

As an architectural fad, they didn't last long. The specimens that remain are usually to be found rusting in farmers' fields, junk yards, or on the fringes of deserts where they were first set down, although a few have been reclaimed and restored as annexes to more traditional houses by dedicated retrophiles.

Anyway, as I said, I let all of my musings and readings about these alluring mini egg houses swirl around in the imaginarium for a few days and this new narrative poem is what eventually hatched. Think April 1961: On Easter Saturday April 1st, the Beatles commenced their four-month residency at Hamburg's Top Ten club, Easter Day was on April 2nd, on April 10th a radar transmission from JPL in Pasadena fixed the exact distance from Earth to Venus (26,372,600 miles), Blackpool (then in Division 1) lost to West Brom, Manchester United and Arsenal in the space of eight days, the USA attempted an abortive invasion of Cuba, King Zog of Albania died, Adolph Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for Nazi war crimes and on 12th April Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth in space. Meanwhile, in the Aquarius Mountains of Mohave County, Arizona...

Like Easter Everywhere

No regrets, peyote. After a few spliffs, that joke about

where's it at man, fresh baked bread and olives, bottles 

of cold beer, Gary as shaman led them through the rites.

Hot from the foothills of Fuji to Gethsemane, Arizona,

with his poetic Myths & Texts, bedroll, prayer-mat, bells,

he galvanized their souls for sacrament. With ceremony

they partook, tasted, breathed, waited for the sun to sink.

Paul played guitar and sang a mountain song as evening

and mescaline kicked in, the latter like a handsome mule

and they its trusting riders, wherever it might carry them

in their altered state, gazing wide-eyed at the wonderful 

overhead where pin-pricking angels had tattooed heaven

to let the glory of the great beyond come twinkling down.

Crazy Peter tripped off a soliloquy to all the Gods, madly

declaiming after Blake how everything that lives is holy,

as well as being perfect within itself, part of the universal

oneness. They thought this very wise, breathed the scent

of sagebrush on the air, sat transfigured, quietly beautiful

and later, as heat left the land, crawled up into the womb 

of Paul's space-age egg house sitting on the desert's edge.

Shuttered, they lit candles, lay down, grew mellower still. 

Maudlin Mary, broad-hipped earth-motherly, made moan

as she received the trinity, bright love lights in their eyes,

lost every one in the mystery of death of ego. They slept

then, luxuriating cruciform and beatific, while in the hills

coyotes howled as the karmic wheel rolled smoothly two 

degrees over stoned earth, fecund land waiting on rebirth,

liminal till sunlight flooded Aquarius, its colony of domes. 

Gary, Peter, Paul and Mary rose newborn on the third day,

clear-eyed, all hungry for eggs over easy with home fries.

Thanks for reading. Be good, be happy, don't be foiled!  S ;-)