Recall

A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. That's how some would define the word 'Nostalgia'.

Whether some of my recollections are purely simple "recalls"or whether the fall into the "nostalgia" category, would probably depend on the degree of  'wistfulness' and 'longing' associated with them. For the purposes of this blog post, I shan't try to analyse the events into categories like 'happy' or 'sad', 'longing'  or 'dreading' -- they will simply be recall recollections of the past, which I have already 'tested' on some younger people.

Take, for example, a simple cup of coffee and slice of buttered bread. 

Take the boiling water, the coffee component and the bread individually. The kettle (after the phasing out of the old aluminium flat-bottom boiling kettle atop the wood-fired Victorian Aga stove) was a new-fangled electric plug-in device, which could generate more steam than the local power station! And, unlike its predecessor, you needed to switch the steaming thing off at the wall-plug as soon as the water reached boiling point.  

My recall is walking into the kitchen on a cold morning to be faced with millions of rivulets of condensed steam running down the walls to tiny pools of water all along the skirting boards -- whoever had 'put the kettle on' had forgotten to keep a watchful eye over the device -- in extreme cases, the thing would boil dry and the heating element (which was clearly accessible inside the bottom of the kettle), would simply overheat and 'burn out'.

Today,having successfully boiled the water in a self-descaling, self-cut-off thermostatically-controlled boiler, I can 'make' my cuppa. Instead of  percolating the ground coffee beans in a stove-top percolator, the new-fangled technology allowed one to make coffee virtually 'instantly' by adding a teaspoon of liquid coffee essence in a cup of boiling water.

Of course, as kids we were not allowed to have 'instant' coffee -- it was far too expensive waste on kids! I once tasted of few drops of the neat essence from the bottle - Arrghh! Not sure what I expected, but certainly not the bitter result!!  

At that time, powdered instant coffee was not available -- I think so, as I was never really privy to grocery shopping at that stage -- the self-service 'supermarket'had not yet been invented. We were relegated to the class which was doomed to drink aromatic 'normal' coffee percolated from coffee beans, recently ground on the green-grocer's shop counter. 

 Bugger.

The slice of bread.

No, don't simply take it from the plastic sleeve packet. Take the loaf from the roll-top bread-bin, get the bread-board and the bread-knife and cut a slice of bread.

"No, not a 'doorstep' and not a 'wedge', either, mind."

It was almost impossible to produce perfect slices from a warm freshly-baked loaf -- that was a sure recipe for instant disaster -- you could just as well grab the thing in your mits and rip it into chunks -- like they did in days of old...

On one of the end-crusts of each loaf, you would find a printed paper 'duty' stamp much like a postage or revenue stamp. I can't remember the reason, but I always believed that there was some old phlegmy geezer at the bakery, who had the job of spitting on the back of the stamps and sticking one to the end of each loaf.

If served a sandwich with the label still on a crust-end, I would carefully remove the geezer-gob with a bit of the underlying bread, just in case. I recall that I had imagined detecting a stale taste when I once accidentally bit into such a label. Arrghh!

Come to think of it, I always seemed to get the label end-slice.

Bugger.