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Sunday, 15 April 2018

HORSE PLAY BY FIONA CUMMINGS


A great day so far and hopefully more to come later. Our Son went out last night and got back to Shams at four this morning… He should be a milk man. Haha. For my Bloggets who live abroad, the good old English tradition of a milkman is so quaint, well used to be. Before my time, a horse and cart would be used, but then came the electric cart. An electric cart used to drive through our streets, park up and you would hear the clinking of glass bottles as the milkman took the pint glass bottles from the crates to drop off at our door stops. The foil lids used to be in different colours I know one was red and the ones we used to get were silver. Silver was full cream. I believed that children should have full cream milk for their bones. Sometimes the magpies used to peck at the shiny lids so the milk would have to be emptied and then we had to wash the bottles to recycle again the milkman would pick up the empties when he dropped the full ones off! The milkmen were into recycling before it became fashionable or necessary.

 

As the years went by the things we could get delivered some would say progressed. I could get a sack of potatoes, yogurts, cream and other items sometimes fresh orange juice. They were sweet innocent days and I was fortunate to always live in good areas where no one ever stole from our doorsteps. But now days there are no glass bottles our milkman delivers the same plastic large litres you can buy at the grocery shop. Nothing quaint about that. And the price is three times as much as we can get from a shop.

 

When I was a child and in my early years of marriage too when I was in my teens and early twenties, we had a rag and bone man. He used to come to us down our streets in a cart that was pulled by a horse with a man steering it shouting Rag and Bone, sometimes just bone and other times n!

You would take him things he could recycle to make money from and in return he would hand you clothes pegs he would have made. It was up to us whether we wanted his pegs or not… the cart would be filled up with your pans, old dishes, bedding anything you didn’t want that he would be able to make some money from. They were normally gypsies/travellers as we now have to call them. I’m not sure when gypsies became wrong to say. Why wrong too. I mean travellers?

 

I know of people who live in caravans who are typical gypsies who have not moved for over a year, so, not much travelling going on then….

 

Guess what the (Travellers/Rag and bone men) come around in now? a blooming van with a loud speaker on the roof or outside of their window. When I first heard that, I was shocked. I thought it was to let us know our gas would be going off or we had a water leak as apart from voting day, that is the only time we hear a loud speaker from a car with a man shouting stuff at us… when is as told it was the local rag and bone man? And how times have changed. People were bringing out old TV’s and so on. In my days it really was old pans…

 

Now, The Grand National. Hmm. When I was a child I was just like my baby great Niece who I spoke with yesterday. Super excited to put a sweep on within the family. I would put my 50p and pick a number or a horse from the hat at home and between my Mum Dad and big Brother, we would sit in front of our telly, watching   the biggest horse race day of the year in England, and shout at the TV hoping my horse would win. I never won, my brother always did. And yesterday my Niece did she was so sweet and happy to tell me of her winnings. But now I am older, I hate the fact that out of 38 horses who run that awful race, only 12 finished the race. The other 26 fell, were injured and so many years horses have had to get put down. It’s heart breaking. Yesterday there was a screen put around a horse that fell, there are rumours that the horse died and it’s all been a cover up. 80 horses at least have been killed since the Grand National began. So, I don’t put money on that race or any other. To make a horse run so fast for in the horse’s case, no reason, to put blinkers on them so they can’t see to the sides of their eyes and used to whip them to make them go faster. How do they train them to go so fast I have to ask myself? It’s very wrong and I dream of a world where horses can run, but freely and without anyone on them.

 

   

 

 

 

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