Old Spice

Mrs Talpa's father always held that I, as a mere Yorkshire tyke, was but a Scotsman with the brains and generosity beaten out of me. Perhaps he was right, at least on the second account, as we are still using my great-grandmother's painted metal spice box. I guess that it must be well over a 100 years old but it is still going strong. I value it greatly as a link with the past but it also reminds me that sadly I never knew the love of a grandmother; my paternal grandmother died in 1919 during the great flu epidemic and my maternal one died of an asthmatic attack in 1930.

The spices are rather newer! The cloves we brought back from Bali a few years ago. Until modern times, cloves grew only on a few islands in the Maluku Islands historically known as the Spice Islands. In Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, cloves were worth at least their weight in gold due to their rarity. Ours were a good bit cheaper!