Hot, Cross Bun

So much to ‘blog’ about, and here’s another from my esteemed quiver. One of my fans asked me yesterday, ‘When are we going to get a new one?’

So, here we go. But where? Bombings and other hells. The election – and,

When exactly are we ‘old’? At what age have people the right to call you old? I dislike the word. It sounds like something – an old sock? – worn out and ready to be thrown away. I don’t think we grow old, but grow up. In fact why should not life be a preparation for the next? Or the may Nexts, as in Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull? But, in terms of there being just this life, why should we not all come to fruition? Enjoy all we have been learning about ourself and what fulfils us. Be at that final peak of Maslow’s triangle?

As to the election. Teachers and nurses have not had a pay rise for five years. The Prime Minister said to one nurse, on what counts for national television these days yesterday, that they all knew and cared and understood, but that there is not a magic money tree they could just shake. Well, Madam, you could possibly shake a few apples or at least leaves off your own tree for the nurses and teachers to get a penny a year more. And there are vast orchards of trees groaning with fruit in the gardens of the unjustifiably lavishly paid, the orchards of tax dodgers, and in those lovely seaside resorts called off shore banks.

‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with Thee. But, Sir….’

Don’t you just love that Hopkins calls his God, ‘Sir’?

So, Madam you could shake a few trees, and Sir, what advice have you to give us? Sir, we have unfairness, and bombings and we are all born to die which scares a lot of us shitless. And we are all born cuddly and loved babies, when our destiny is to be dumped as the unloved old or – worse?- ‘elderly’.

I don’t believe we can blame you for bombings or disease or other disasters. I believe you are the consciousness for good which is in all of us. And, because nothing can exist without its opposite, there is a consciousness for bad in all of us too. No person up there decides to create an earthquake. Or allows it if he could stop it.

Good ultimately wins over bad, surely, because it is positive. Positive IS, but what is negative is not. The nature of creation by the good is a creation of beauty and diversity and interest. And eternal new discovery. People say they would not want to live long, or forever, because they would be bored. To me there are so many material and intellectual delights, I can’t imagine ever being finished with all discovery, especially with what the mind can throw up. And as for relationships…

I have long wondered if the ultimate aim or bliss of life is fun. My daughter, Haidee, wrote her Maths Degree Thesis on Is Maths A Science, and she concluded that Maths was fun. I was told on my English Degree that some critics had decided that poetry is fun. Another daughter, Lalage, when she was deciding between maths and at least one other subject to read for a degree, chose maths, ‘because it is more fun’.

W. S. Gilbert sings,

‘What though distant shadows fall,

sooner later, over all –

sing a merry madrigal.’

Indeed.

So, with bombings and teenage granddaughters worried about going to pop concerts, and two daughters who are teachers having to buy stationery for their pupils out of their own salaries, what else has been going on in my family which has been fun?

At Easter time, with three daughters, I knew I would be getting enough chocolate and I fancied a hot cross bun. Wheat is a bit of a No No for me so I asked Lindsay, my son, to buy me some gluten free ones. He lives almost on top of the largest Sainsbury’s in our town.

He came to see me on Easter Saturday and had no buns. Some nice presents, but no buns. I asked him why and he said that, when I asked for them, he and his wife had already been out shopping and did not want to go out again! When the supermarket is almost in their garden? Though he is in cockney terms, of course, my currant bun.

On Easter Day I emailed to him:

Today’s the day we’re meant to have some fun

Today’s the day we’re meant to have a bun.

( With the signs for music, of which my laptop has none.)

He wrote back,

‘No, I don’t know that song.

       It must have been from the days of rationing.’

Which made me laugh out loud.

I explained it came from:

Tonight’s the day we’re going to have some fun,

Tonight’s the night for you and everyone.

We’ll dance and play until the break of day,

Holay, tonight’s the night.

Then I told him that I only have to hear one word or hear one note or see an object, and a whole song comes back to me from fifty or so years ago. I saw an old – street organ ?- and immediately in my head sang,

Put another nickel in

In the Nickel Odeon,

All I want is loving you

And music, music, music.

Closer, my dear come closer…

and more.

Lindsay commented, ‘Well, you are going to be popular, aren’t you, when we get lots of power cuts?’ (Are we going to, then? Is that yet another government promise?)

But the bun thing went on and spread out in my life. Lindsay said he thought that ‘bun’ is intrinsically a funny word . We got on to ‘bun fight.’ Then Lalage mentioned, ‘hair in a bun’ and a writing group member ‘bun in the oven.’

Let me know if you can think of more.

There was an old ‘dip, dip, dip’ chant which went, ‘there’s a party on the hill will you come? Bring your own cup and saucer and a bun.’ ( yet another rich gift from the days of rationing… They could spare an apple or two, it would seem, from their sparse trees. What with maybe sayings and surely recipes.)

Douglas Adams concluded that the answer to life, the universe and everything else is 42.

Perhaps instead it is ‘bun’.

Which after all, rhymes with fun!

In Neverland, Brenda of course would have had stale hot cross buns. That is, if  her mother had remembered it was Easter at all. In the book Christmas  seems to come upon Gladys as a bit of a surprise. She is not a good housekeeper and quite often buys new bread and buns when the previous supply hasn’t run out. But Brenda, ever trying to make things better, would no doubt use up the stale bits herself.

 

Pamela Pickton’s novel Neverland is on sale on amazon now, and on all good ebook websites, and read about her travails and worldly challenges in her Zitebooks collection of short stories, Reasons, which is also available to download from Amazon.