Peas for our thyme
Warning: this is not about companion planting or cooking.
On most days that start with W, I have a couple of wines with a couple of friends. We are known as the ‘Wednesday Boys’ and the establishment we go to serves us a glass of white followed by one of red and then quizzes us on what wines we have been given. Our hit rate isn’t great, so we not unreluctantly return each week for more practise. (We have been doing this for about 35 years now and still to learn much we have.)
When the Wednesday Boys were teenagers sixty years ago, they started to take notice of cars, girls and goings on beyond their villages. Even before then, they and their friends knew there had been a Second World War. Those that could count also knew that there had been a First World War, but were more fuzzy about that one. They knew about WWII because they would run around with their arms flung out pretending they were spitfires and ratta-tat-tatting imaginary Jerries. Their war knowledge came not from the mouths of their former-soldier fathers, whose lips remained post-war shut until loosened by beer at the Returned Services premises, entry to which children were verboten. It came instead from comics and the Saturday afternoon flicks. At the matinee they would gape (or would have, had their mouths not been full of jubes and aniseed balls) at films starring stiff-upper-lip Brits who went around saying things like…
