The Wrong Kind Of Grass

When I was looking for that umbrella photograph the other day, I found another couple of pictures. They were taken about a year later, so I'm nearly six and you can see that we've been joined by a new baby brother.

It looks like another glorious summers evening - and it was, I remember it well. But not because we'd made a happy, unscheduled stop to play (we never seemed to do much unscheduled in our family); I remember it because, when I came home, I had the worst combined hayfever-asthma attack of my entire childhood. That grass was bad grass, man.

In the days before inhalers, our last ditch treatment came in a bottle. It was so vile that I had to be seriously suffering before I could be persuaded to swallow a spoonful of "Yellow" as it was dubbed by my mother in a transparent attempt to emphasize its cheerier qualities. And I won't deny it, it had its good points. The weird sense of euphoria it induced, for instance. Seems pretty obvious why they took it off the market, now, when I think about it. It was pretty trippy stuff. And it was the seventies

But I'm wandering off my point, which is this: when you pull out a photo and start to think of the story, make sure you are telling the right story. And any interesting sidenotes: if you look in the top photo you can see the very edge of our car. A sea green Ford Anglia. It's almost exactly the same as the one Harry and Ron fly in the film of Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets. Not identical, but close enough to be fun. I can feel a postscript page coming on..