Funny how you don’t notice how often you say a thing until someone points it out.
In my case realization dawned when my darling daughter-in-law started to giggle when I said, ‘The burnt bits are best’, at the dinner table!
This amusement is obviously shared by my son, as an apron came through the post on my birthday ‘personalized’ by the company through whom they had ordered it with:
‘THE BURNT BITS ARE BEST’ printed on the front!
Aren’t kids GREAT?
Mind you ---- my particular pet phrase is TRUE.
Show me someone who doesn’t enjoy scraping the dark brown frill off the edge of a rice pudding dish or the crunchy bits from the bottom of a Yorkshire pudding tin, or chewing on the blissful skins of baked apples and I’ll show you a very BORING person!
Surely my Mother was not the only one to gape, wide eyed at her teenage daughter and blurt out - yet again - ‘You’re not going out like THAT!’
(Oh yes, I was a teenager of the ‘60’s with a skirt barely long enough to cover my knickers! Hey-ho)
Another parental ‘stand-by’ was ‘Do what you want --- you will anyway’ at the end of an un-winnable argument.
Lurking, unsaid, behind that one was, ‘I’m right and you’ll be sorry. Just wait’. She was --- and so was I - usually!
My Dad had his favourite sayings too, but mostly not suitable for a church magazine! I loved him.
Aren’t parents GREAT?
More suitable for both this magazine and for our meditation as we continue the Holy Season of Lent is this paragraph in a book that I have long treasured,
‘The Apostle John lived to a great age; and when he was very old, tradition says, and unable any longer to preach to the people, he used to be carried into the church and repeat over and over again the words: ‘Little children, love one another’.
When he was asked why he so often repeated the words, he replied,
‘If this one thing were attained, it would be enough’.
Isn’t that GREAT?