Cracking Up
Easter Monday and we shoot over to Craigend to visit my Dad. He's eighty-five but keen to impress us with his grasp of modern technology in that he has just had cable television installed. Worringly he did this because he has heard that the Government is "just about to switch off analogue television". I told him that the switch-off wouldn't happen for a few years but he shrugged, handed me the remote control and asked me to show him how he could get SPL football matches on the screen. Of course I had to break the bad news that he would have to subscribe to a pay-tv channel to do that. So we worked out the sums and discovered he would have to fork out almost forty quid a month to get all the services he was keen on. On the plus side, he doesn't have to pay for a TV licence any more.
We switch off the set and he hands out chocolate easter eggs to the Zedettes and a ring of Polish pork sausage for me. This prompts a nostalgic conversation about childhood Easters when he would take the family to Drumpellier Loch so that we could roll our eggs down a hillside. Not chocolate eggs, of course, but hard-boiled eggs that had been dyed and painted with faces. This proud tradition is maintained in my own household but now children can buy special kits with stickers and hats with which to transform their eggs.
Meanwhile all this talk about the good old days means that we open up the famous Zycinski black bag of photographs where my Dad has stored school photographs, holidays snaps and his amazing collection of Polish navy photographs from his wartime years. There are not many photographs of me in the bag. When you're the youngest of eight children you have to accept that the novelty of taking photographs of your breed must have worn off by the time the last nipper put in an appearance.
Mrz Z was keen to find a photograph of me as a child so that she could compare it to the Zedettes. I finally found one taken at primary school when I was seven years old. Oh those happy innocent days. Hard boiled eggs and just three channels on the telly. Football included.
