My water bottle

I am shortly going for my walk - we are back to cool weather so it can be done. It was too hot yesterday. I have been thinking about my drink bottle as a topic for a while and since nothing else springs to mind here I go. It's loosely connected to food after all.

I'm not a fan of drink bottles - I think it's a fashionable fetish basically but occasionally you do need one, and I do take one with me on my walks. Then there's the problem for people of what to give you as a present at Christmas. One year I decided to ask for a drink bottle. It had to be metal - I do not like drinking water, or anything else come to that, out of plastic - and so my sister, who, I think was staying with us that year, gave me this. It is custom printed with the lovely photograph of myself, my brother and sister on an English beach. You can't see it very well in the picture so here it is. For we have so few photos from our childhood that I too have them all.

The bottle's drinking mechanism (basically a straw I think) has broken, but I just take the top off and drink straight from the bottle. I love it as I carry with me a reminder of a very happy, though poor childhood, as I walk. Memories are important to me - happy and sad - they all make us what we are - and besides the particular happinesses and sadnesses are usually fleeting. Some stay with us for a very long time and leave their mark, but even the most ecstatic and the most heartbreaking fade over time. Time is a great healer or a belittler - depending on how you look at it.

On this beach, in this moment - my brother and I were happy - my sister less so. Three is a tricky number - one seemed always to be left out - which is why I only had two children. Well I had thought maybe four, but after the second I called a halt. I was not a good enough mother to go on. Besides it's an overcrowded world. The fact that my sister looks sad, or maybe cross is not necessarily an indication of how we were all the time and should not be taken as such. It is a moment in time. One of millions which were not captured on film. Nevertheless because we have so few photographs of that long ago time, we do perhaps perceive ourselves as shown there. And let's face it nobody is probably truly as we are in a photograph. We all pose - even children, and some find it difficult to pose and become super self-conscious. This photo though seems real somehow. How skinny I was and how all over the place my hair is, but how happy. It's a beach but we are all rugged up in thick, warmish clothes - at the top anyway. Barefoot though. Well it's England. I'm not sure where. I don't think it's Portsmouth where my grandmother lived because I think all the beaches there are pebbly, so maybe Devon where we went on holidays sometimes - or Dorset. If it was Devon though it would have been summer, so pretty shabby weather for summer.

So thank you for the bottle sister dear.