It is funny how in the doing of simple little things, the sub-conscious mind can produce outwardly unimportant memory flashbacks lost from the lived experience. 

This thought came to me in the mundane process of buttering two slices of toast. I caught myself doing something my father often did with butter, honey and jam. He would often make a slit through the side crusty bit of the sliced toast and then insert the blade of his butter-coated knife to its fullest extent, applying a little vertical pressure with the result that the blade emerged from the interior of the toast so clean that it could be put straight into the honey or jam without introducing extraneous material from one jar to the next.

I can see him doing this, with me as I then was, a small boy, standing at the kitchen bench at eye-level. Another trick that he had to spread honey was to tip the jar on a slight angle for the honey to flow, blade of knife poised across the jar’s mouth so that when enough had passed onto the toast, a quick sideways slice of the knife would meter, drip free, the precise required amount, squarely in the centre of the toast.

So now here I am thinking fondly of my father and wondering just how many other forgotten, good, small things did he so effortlessly imprint on my mind… and permanently too. 

Was it a mark of his inventive mind at work? Or a consequence perhaps of hungry times in the Great Depression, when nothing was, or could be, wasted? 

How many more, outwardly small but inherently large insights might have come my way but for the early end to my parents’ war-wrecked marriage?

Ah, loss and gain, happiness and sadness… all the elusive elements of life… how easily do they escape and slip away.

By David James