Absent Minded

Hazy memory came back to me while lying in the bath. Maybe I was 5, maybe 7. Could have been Scotland but more likely to be Devon or Cornwall. The family - Mum (long brown wool coat), Dad (fisherman's smock and the blanket wrapped round over one shoulder and under one arm), Amy being carried, and me - walking down a path from the cliff to the beach. My head got hot so I took off my white wooly hat and launched it over onto the beach, from where I would collect it when we got down there. Unfortunately, the unforeseen happened, the hat got caught in the thorny bushes its way down. Fear. Mum, or perhaps Dad, asked me what did you do that for? I said I thought it would get down to the beach. Nobody said anything else about it. Relief.


Earlier this week I decided to heat up the last spoonful of plum pudding left over from Christmas day. It came in a microwaveable plastic bowl with a lid. So I stuck it all back in the microwave and pinged it for 6 minutes. In the living room, chopping up the tree, I heard it end. The dining room and kitchen were full of white thick smoke. Running in, opened the back door, smoke wafted out, acrid stink, opened microwave and inside the pudding had embers burning inside, the plastic bowl melted completely around it. Chucked it out into the garden. End of christmas is a lingering smell of burned plastic.