cakes and coincidences

Totally forgot to take my all singin' all dancin' camera out with me this afternoon. Totally forgot to take my really annoyingly bad camera out with me this afternoon - only camera doo dah I had was on my phone, which is not the best.

Today was afternoon tea at the Balmoral with Mum. As it's Mum's birthday on Christmas Day I thought I'd do something nice with her a little later as a birthday treat and thought the afternoon tea idea was a nice one.

Little tiny sandwiches and little tasty cakes. I love little tiny tasty things (so long as there are enough of them to make it feel like you're eating the equivelant of a great big massive tasty thing, obviously!).

Whilst we were munching daintily on our fancies, I started to tell my Mum a story about a song I'd heard on the radio the week before. I deliberately didn't tell her the song title as I wanted to make it my big finale in the tale so I told her everything else instead.

Basically, it was a song that was out when I was really, really young - as young as 3 or 4 and I hadn't heard it since then. I remembered that Mum (who was the ripe age of 21 at that time) really loved the song so when it came on the radio, she'd turn it up and we'd dance around the kitchen to it.

Like I said, I heard it for the first time in years and as soon as the first notes played I got this rush of emotion - memories came crashing back, not just memories but feelings and smells and colours and sounds. I was sent straight back to the kitchen of my childhood. I could see the wallpaper, the cooker with the egg timer on the top of it. The coffee container on the worktop. I could see the curtains blowing gently in the breeze. I could see my 21 year old Mum standing in the door way smiling.

I've not thought of that kitchen since we moved from it in 1985, it was such a bizarre feeling. The song made me laugh though and I was so glad that I'd remembered to tell my Mum all about it.

As I was telling her the story, sitting at a little table eating little cakes, me at the age of 35 and Mum still not that much older than me - I watched her face as the story unfolded and I couldn't read her expression. I got to the end of the story (apart from the title of the song) and I was worried that she'd lost interest in the story or wasn't connecting to it because I hadn't told her what song it was. When I finally told her what the song was, her jaw dropped open and she started laughing and saying 'oh my God Abi'.

She then told me that she'd been sitting in her car the night before, waiting on Gordon (my step dad) and had been listening to the radio. The exact song I'd been talking about came on the radio and she thought 'I've not heard this song since the 70s'. Whilst she was listening to it, she started to think about the old kitchen in the flat we'd been living in at the time. She thought of the wallpaper, the matching curtains. She thought of me sitting in my chair eating my breakfast. She thought of how much she loved that song and how she always turned it up and how we always danced to it.

As I was telling her MY story about the song, she was thinking 'wouldn't it be funny if Abi said it was the same song'..

And it was.

Mad.

Anyway - it was this song. I love stuff like that. Goosebump stuff.