Changing times!

Well, we probably should cancel Christmas right now. Aled Jones has been accused of sexual impropriety or sexual harassment or something of that nature. Every Christmas since I can’t remember when the cartoon film “The Snowman”, featuring that terrible man singing “I’m walking in the air”, has been on television during the festive season. Since Kevin Spacey was accused, it seems to be generally accept that we should no longer watch his films or consider him a good actor. So by the same standards, we should not have any truck with Aled Jones and his fine voice. Okay, he was only a boy when he recorded the song but they do say the child is father to the man.

The whole thing has got a little out of hand!

In today’s paper I have come across two items about the difficulty of ending relationships. Breaking up, it seems, is harder than ever to do. It used to be that some of your friends wouldn’t speak to you after you finished with someone, although quite what it had to do with them I never really understood. In an extreme case, an ex-boyfriend’s mother cut my mother dead on the street as a result of our break-up. Ridiculous! But now you have all the bother of twitter accounts and shared photos on social media to deal with as well.

Someone has even set up a Museum of Broken Relationships, which began as an installation in an arts festival. People sent them items, such as the silk dress one lady was married in, crushed into a jar and thus converted into a thing of beauty once more instead of hanging limply in her wardrobe reminding her of the failed marriage. Clearly it was not a meringue-style wedding dress!

I wonder who goes to such an exhibition!

But we can’t go back to simpler times. That’s just how it is.

My Italian friend was reminiscing the other day about when she used to bring huge great containers of olive oil from Italy to the UK because she could not find it here and could not cook without it. This was, of course, before there were restrictions on the quantity of liquids you could carry from one country to another. We pointed out that it was always possible to buy olive oil here; it was just that you had to purchase it in tiny little bottles from the chemist. Perfume-sized bottles (although now even the perfume comes in bigger bottles) and almost as expensive.

In our turn, we reminisced about how it was used medicinally, a little warm olive oil on cotton wool to cure ear ache. And my mother used to warm her hands at the fire, put a drop of the precious olive oil on her hands and then rub our backs and chests when we had a chesty cold and cough. The smell of olive oil warming in a frying pan still has the Proustian power to send me back to childhood!

There is nothing like a bit of good old nostalgia!