Nostalgia

I'm going away on holiday soon. We're going to Brazil and looking forward to exploring - but after we've had a rest!

For some reason I've been thinking of my holidays when I was a child. They were all spent with my maternal grandparents in a small fishing village on the north-east coast of Scotland. They owned the village's general store, Post Office, bakery, haberdashers, etc - the shop sold everything! I can still remember the smell of newly-dug potatoes, in sacks leaning against the food counter, and the fabulous scent of newly baked bread. There were huge slabs of butter and cheese, which were cut with a long piece of wire, and biscuits were loose in tins and sugar measured into thick, dark blue bags. I can remember the 'bop, bop, bop' sound of Granda stamping the mail before it was collected by the Royal Mail van.

The house was huge and part of the same building, and the ground floor was rented out to a family. There were three bathrooms, all in a row, and three huge attic rooms which we children used as playrooms when the weather was bad - there were boxes of clothes, games and a huge brass bedstead in each room. From the windows you could see the beach and the sea at the bottom of the square and, twice a day, a herd of cows processed through the square on their way to milking. The garden at the back was massive and filled with every kind of vegetable, including curly kale, which fascinated me. There was a huge strawberry plot and a greenhouse with fragrant tomatoes and a vine twining along the roof.

Magical stuff! Although I loved being there all summer, I certainly didn't realise then just what an idyllic sort of time and place it was.