Elephants - Jumbo Jet

 

My recent travels have taken me to Cheshire, Yorkshire and Scotland over the last five or six weeks. Most of it has been during some of the warmest summer weather and at each location  I’ve benefitted from the comfort of my long, loose-fitting, printed skirts. I’m not really one for wearing a skirt but I’ll make an exception to stay cool. I don’t like to get dressed up either, so these are perfect with a tee-shirt.  The appeal, besides the easy-wear, easy-travel fabric is the print of decorated elephants creating a circular pattern.  Yesterday I added to my collection when I couldn’t resist an elephant-print dress in a sale.  This was me not supposed to be buying for myself but life’s too short.

I like elephants. I haven’t got a problem with their trunks up or down, facing doors inwards or outwards, or any other associated superstitions. My grandmother is probably wagging her finger at me from the after-life. Birds are surely worse, aren’t they, Nanna?

Elephants crossing the promenade used to be a pleasing feature of my drive to work in the summer. In those days I lived in South Shore and worked in North Shore. My preferred route, in my Austin A40 a long time ago, was to get on to the front at Harrowside and enjoy the sea views all the way up. I tried to time it in order to reach Central Promenade when the circus elephants were being escorted out of Blackpool Tower for a walk on the beach and a dip in the sea, depending on the tide. Many times I queued as they plodded across the road, trunk to tail, enormous and magnificent, and wished I was in the first car.

Information from WWF websites: Both African and Indian elephants are classed as endangered species. Illegal activity in poaching and ivory trading goes on and for African elephants there has been a loss of natural habitat due to the expansion of the human population and land being used for agriculture. The WWF is working towards preventing both these situations from worsening. 

To end on a lighter note, I found this poem by Spike Milligan,

 

Jumbo Jet  

 I saw a little elephant standing in my garden,

     I said ‘You don’t belong in here,’ he said ‘I beg your pardon?’,
     I said ‘This place is England, what are you doing here?’,
     He said ‘Ah, then I must be lost’ and then ‘Oh dear, oh dear’.

‘I should be back in Africa, on Saranghetti’s Plain’,

     ‘Pray, where is the nearest station where I can catch a train?’.
    He caught the bus to Finchley and then to Mincing Lane,
    And over the Embankment, where he got lost, again.

The police they put him in a cell, but it was far too small,

     So they tied him to a lamp-post and he slept against the wall.
     But as the policemen lay sleeping by the twinkling light of dawn,
     The lamp-post and the wall were there, but the elephant was gone!

So if you see an elephant, in a Jumbo Jet,

     You can be sure that Africa’s the place he’s trying to get!

Spike Milligan  (1918-2002)

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

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Letters - Much More Than Pen Friends

I can’t remember the last handwritten letter I received, not counting notes in Christmas cards. The speed and availability of social media and email has replaced all that wonderful personal touch. Occasionally I get an envelope stylishly addressed by the neat hand of a cousin in Virginia. The contents will be a printed copy of family news, fairly short with a few photos placed in the text, the same thing sent to various people. Of course, I love it and read about the events across the pond with joy. Many miles separate our branches of the family tree, it’s great to be in touch but it’s not the same as a handwritten letter. We live in electronic times. My replies or ‘letters’ are always email.

Letters were my world for a while in my mid-teens. I was horrified to learn that we had to move and to Cheshire of all places. It didn’t make sense. There we were, all happy living in Dad’s dream come true, a pub on Blackpool prom, when out of the blue his services were required elsewhere and we all had to go.  My reaction was outbursts of tears, tantrums, slamming doors, and refusing to leave my friends and my school.  I begged and pleaded with him to speak to the brewery, the man at the top, whatever his name was, and get the stupid idea stopped. His expertise was needed in Cheshire, but we might come back, eventually. I tried another tack. The move would disrupt my schooling. We were halfway through the fourth year, preparing for my ‘O’ levels, I needed to stay put, so I would move in with my best friend. This was the best idea I’d ever had in my life, at this point. It was perfect. We could carry on going ice-skating together on beat nights and youth club on Fridays and I would continue to study hard, her mother would make sure of it. No. It wasn’t happening. My world came crashing down and I, with loud protests declaring complete hate for Cheshire and all who had brought his about, had no choice but to pack my belongings ready for the move. It was March. I was streaming with a heavy cold, as if the ordeal wasn’t miserable enough. We stopped for a meal on the M6 at Knutsford services and I tearfully called my friend from a payphone.

 

 It had been decided that we would write to each other, often, and we did. Letters went backwards and forwards between Blackpool and the place in Cheshire from myself and four others on a regular basis. Turquoise ink on bright orange, pink or lime green paper, such was the fashion. We used fountain pens and recorded our daily lives, news from school, family news, gossip about who’s in trouble for what. We wrote about our favourite music, pop stars, television, fashion and everything that filled our lives. The letters were my lifeline into the world I’d been forced to leave behind. They were so much more than just friends keeping in touch. I didn’t settle in our new place. I didn’t fit in at school, where everyone was ‘mod’ and into soul music, Ben Sherman shirts and two-tone fabric skirts. I was all prog rock, jeans, lacy blouses and beads. My family moved back to Blackpool after a few months. Nothing to do with me being rebellious, I promise. Dad had done whatever needed doing and the family could settle back into normality. I kept the letters for years after that and how I wish I still had them now. What an illustration of the lives of our mix of teenage girls in 1971, our opinions, worries, our hopes. We all went separate ways as we grew up and two of those friends have now passed away. I remember them all with fondness. Our letters kept us together when I was absent and to be included at that time meant a great deal to me.

As for Cheshire, I have returned to the town and the pub as an adult. It’s very nice, no teenage angst.

In later years, I was staying with my family in Virginia and loved to receive letters from my father. His beautiful handwriting on thin, air mail paper brought me news from home. And later still, when he was in the USA and I was here, our pale blue letters to each other flew the Atlantic on a weekly basis. I’ve kept all those.

I found this poem by Hugh McMillan

 

Here is a letter

come across the ocean

over the back of a world

curved like a whale.

I unwrap it, like tissue,

and sentences spill out,

as though the seal on a jar has broken,

coils of cornflower blue

on paper thin as shell.

 

I saw a sailor’s valentine once

in a museum in Nantucket Sound,

a mosaic of broken scallop

glued in a compass rose.

‘Writ from the heart’ it said.

Words come best like that:

in ink or blood,

when the source is from a major vein.

 

I read, and understand this much:

if ink sees off time and miles, then so must love.

                                                                                                       Hugh McMillan

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

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