Jif

This morning, not at all pottery related, I cleaned the oven. I know it’s not very exciting but it did remind me of something that happened quite a few years ago. Now at school I was not really one for getting into trouble or being shouted at at all, just very quiet, wouldn’t say boo to a goose just read and did my work I suppose. Apart from this time. When I was in the 3rd year of primary school, so about 9 or 10, at the end of the year I had the job of cleaning out the trays that each child had had in my class, you know the plastic ones that have your name on the front and you keep your pencil and exercise book in. I was being helped by my class teachers daughter, Sarah who must have been a few years younger than me, we’d been given a little bottle of Jif and were merrily scrubbing them out. At some point during the job it occurred to me that this bottle squirted stuff out quite nicely and you could draw patterns with it, I eventually realised you could write with it too so I started writing my name with the cleaning stuff in the bottom of the trays. This might have been fine had we stuck to my name but Sarah’s full name was Sarah Margaret Plechowicz which used up an awful lot of cleaner and we got told off for wasting it. Mrs. Plechowicz told me she thought I was much more sensible than that. It made me laugh this morning while I was doing the cleaning though. I wonder what Mrs. P is doing now, maybe I should find her an tell her what I do. I doubt she remembers that incident though. I think around the same time as I was leaving the class or maybe at the Christmas time my mum got an Amaryllis plant for me to give to Mrs. P as a present and her daughter used to call it a Hannarillis.

On saturday I spent the day with about 30 Cub Scouts and 75,000 pieces of Lego. It had been organised for a while which is why I couldn’t make the journey up to Appin to meet Alan’s family and friends. They were pretty much given free reign over these massive amounts of Lego with the only instruction really being to create a village. As you can imagine they had a fantastic time and it didn’t take long before the leaders all joined in. I’ve never known so many children be so very quiet for such a long time. All Scout halls should keep a big box of the stuff for emergency use. There were houses, parks, picnic sites, garden, sheds, cars and lorries, even a car ferry, wind turbines and bridges.

I had to build a bottle kiln but most people thought it was a crematorium!

Today I had a visit from Dave and Sue from Derbyshire, friends of Paul Young’s and Doug. I met them at ClayArt earlier in the year and they were staying in the area so popped over for a visit. They are coming over in an hour or so for dinner, hurrah another chance to make blackberry pie!