Telstales

Author: Cups of T

  • It all started such a long time ago

    ….1958… well the end of it!

    Second of December it was, the birth of me! Sounds a long time ago…well, it was!

    Almost didn’t make it though on this ‘cobbled street conveyor belt journey of my life’ I was a poorly baby apparently given the last rights (wouldn’t have minded if I could have had my first rights and my continuing rights before jumping straight to my last, but hey ho…) with Pyloric Stenosis messing me up for a while. I think that whoever mended me did too good a job allowing too much food intake thereafter hence I ended up as the fat kid in the family, at school and with my friends.

    Humphrey grew on me

    Humphrey…it had a Crescent you know and I grew up there at no.41 in a rented semi detached house, complete with a small front and medium sized back garden and gated driveway. Very modern for it’s day! Set within a southern suburb of Manchester called Urmston. Was a quiet area to live almost on the border of Stretford, old folk living as neighbours and I guess it never really dawned on me how they felt about a ‘younger’ family living between them. Why should I have even thought of how annoying we probably were, I was too busy being a kid.

    Vision

    It wasn’t my fault that with the invention of television albeit all programmes in black and white, I got the label ‘Vision’ by my bro n’ sis. Did I really spend so much time watching the tv for them to call me Terryvision or Vision for short? I mean there weren’t that many programmes around in the early 1960’s, although, Bill and Ben appearing on Watch with Mother, kind of carved out a path for me and my future. More on that later!

  • Life is just a conveyor belt!

    Life and all it contains, I see it just like a conveyor belt, you’re put on at the start as a baby and then you trundle along to the end and drop off as an oldie. Although sometimes the conveyor belt gets shaky and you fall off along its route. Hoping though along its route you can grab things to enjoy and experience and make memories you can hold onto.

    I say ‘conveyor belt’ as to me it rings true. Going back to my younger days as an early teenager working and helping the gardener at Bodrhyddan Hall near Dyserth, North Wales, there was a very overgrown woodland area to the side of the Hall. One day whilst tidying away fallen leaves adjacent to a service roadway and around St Mary’s Well, we uncovered a row of cobblestones about three feet wide which when scraping back again exposed more. We continued to hack back Rhododendron, Sycamore self seeded trees, fern/bracken, a mish mash of entangled bramble and scraping away years and years of deposited and decomposing leaf litter covered with mosses and aglae we exposed even more cobblestones which evidently exposed a path!

    It took a while to fit in the revealing of the cobbled path whilst undertaking all the usual gardening tasks needed to be carried out within the gardens around the Hall. This uncovered cobblestone path had junctions and circles at two locations and at the end was a stone structure which would have housed a bell. Now telling Lord Langford (9th) of our discovery he was delighted as he had totally forgotten about it being there and told us of the path’s significance. It was as he explained the journey of life, starting at St Mary’s well as a baby, proceeding and journeying along the path to the first circle which as the Lord explained was where the marriage took place and arriving at the second circle representing a point in time where children were born. Finally after journeying along the cobbled path to reach the bell to signify death!

    Not sure if this path still exists from it’s discovery in 1972, must make an effort to revisit before the ‘bell’ rings for me!

    However I can relate to this and my own analogy of life being like a conveyor belt!