Recovering...

[curiouswombat]

Thank you to everyone for the good wishes, virtual hugs, and excellent advice following my shunt in the car on Friday. They have obviously helped as I am not as stiff and sore as predicted at all.

So firstly I am going to do the post I had intended for Friday - just a few pictures to show that we are having a nice autumn so far and so there is still a lot of colour in the garden.


















And just to show that I am doing my bit for the future of butterflies....




Even if they are going to only be Cabbage Whites when they grow up - but I have let them live happily on a tub of nasturtiums.



And I have been thinking of hobbits - I always think of hobbits when I am pickling spiced pears for Christmas and winter eating - I have begun to think of them as 'Sam's Spiced Pears'. And I was thinking that to me hobbits live in a version of Tolkien's England - so if they drink cider it is, of course, alcoholic - as apple juice would be called just that, not cider, and if they talk of a field of corn, they mean wheat, not maize, and so on.

And it occurred to me that the mental image of some of my friends must be very different when they think of these things. It was actually brought home to me when Cairistiona had one of the Dunedan women 'shucking' corn - and I puzzled over what she could be doing to it - until I realised it was what you did to what we call sweetcorn. So now I sometimes try to see The Shire, or The Angle, as it must appear to my American friends - and it makes me smile.

I wonder what else we see totally differently in our mind's eye?

Comments

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

I know, right? I really surprised to find (as an adult!) that all those apple trees planted by Johnny Appleseed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed) were mostly for hard cider!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

You know that hadn't occurred to me at all, even though I remember reading something about him in a children's book many years ago. Although, I suppose, they wouldn't say he was planting them for cider making in a children's book!

[gillo]

I know I laughed a lot when I discovered that Mormons ban tea, coffee and Coke, but happily drink cider - including here, where the word never means non-alcoholic!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Really? Oh dear - the poor things! Can you imagine them the morning after?

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

Really? I'm intrigued. How odd! I've never really understood that whole thing. I read the mormon scripture (It's not from the book of mormon, it's from another book) and it said to skip "hot drinks". So tea and coffee bad, but coke or beer should be good. And I'll bet cider was popular in upstate New York in the 1830s.