Bunting Memoir

[I like to pick an approach, each month, rather than a theme, for my writing to play with. Through May, I played with keeping this blog like a diary. I write everyday, so picking the day’s events as inspiration brings a constant flow of material. I write everyday, for the practice with words, and for the practice with attitude. The more I train myself to see the inimitable nature of stuff, situations and sentient beings, the more my contentedness flows. My world evolves, ever more marvelous. So, through June, I intend to make the unique view a more specific focus.]

Bunting cooks in windows or is hung to cool off in the breeze. It spiders out from the War Memorial, zig-zags every street. It matches my mood in brightness, because the phone call from the letting agency was to agree a moving date. Tomorrow is Coronation Day, tomorrow is Baby’s first ever birthday, a week tomorrow is Boy’s sixteenth birthday, two weeks tomorrow we move to Lawhitton. Red, white and blue in variations of stripes, blocks, florals, polka dots; in cotton, in nylon: in glorious plastic Technicolour intense enough to flash me through time to 1977, Silver Jubilee, where I am seven and nearly a half years in age. Everyone had their own personal plastic flag, every kitchen displayed a celebratory tea-towel, bunting spread like bindweed along every fence. It fluttered naturally, whether the wind blew or not. The Queen’s picture was watching you, sometimes from a tea towel, sometimes from a punk’s t-shirt. Punks were clever because they could make their hair any colour at all. Baby queens were called princesses, their hair grew to knee length as soon as they could walk. They wore colossal dresses and teeny gold shoes, everything they owned had a bow on it. The ribbon could be silk, satin or velvet. And wherever they traveled, the bunting grew, all around the buildings and the cake stalls.