History is
toast
[Dream
target date - October 1967]
An evening of email postings
and desperately dull websites. I've got a cold, a creative
block and I'm craving food for comfort. It's midnight and
toast is about as good as it's gets. Even though I realise
there's a risk of alerting my sleeping family to my midnight
excesses, I turn up the dial on the toaster and a few minutes
later the toast pops up, blackened to perfection. Tthis takes
me back to Saturday teatime at my Grandma's house on Sherwood
Avenue, Blidworth.
As a young child I'd sit mesmerised with
the 'Lander's White Sliced' balanced precariously on
the end of a brass toasting fork. The shimmering hot
coals projected fantastic shapes against the black walls
of the fireplace. One day you'd get stop-frame dinosaurs
from a million years BC, the next, you were flying Fireball
XL5 on a collision course with the sun.
Then
there was the Bonanza title sequence. You know, the bit in
the old Western TV series where the treasure map bursts into
flames revealing some fat bloke called 'Hoss'. You'd get that
one if you daydreamed too long or if the bread accidentally
slipped off the toasting fork.
Toast
will always be linked with those BBC teatime favorites of the
1960's. The rotating lenses of the Grandstand news-camera giving
way to the banshee wail of the BBC radiophonic workshop and
yet another Dalek invasion.
Grandma
Fillingham was very cynical about Dr Who, but tolerated the
programme all the same. A semi-circular ottoman provided a protective
barrier between myself and the ranting robots on the TV screen.
The Daleks were both terrifying and strangely seductive. I loved
the way they rolled effortlessly across the flat studio floor.
It never really occured to me that these galactic tyrants couldn't
even climb a staircase, well you don't consider such practicalities
when you are only six years old do you?
Email
Copyright
- Paul Fillingham
Last update - 8 July, 2001
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