See With My Eyes

Listening to Shorelife - Mouth Music

Lots of my recall of the past is triggered by the various smells of cleaning products. As I came through the main door this morning, the whiff of whatever polish had been used brought back the smells, sounds and images of the biology lab at my middle school. This School was at Tunnel Hill just outside Upton-Upon-Severn but it was demolished for houses ten years ago. We always used to laugh whenever anyone mentioned that the building had won a design award as it seemed a particularly anonymous box to us though I suppose the big windows and consequent light interior were quite a plus. Anyway, the biology lab was fully equipped with a full set of hamsters, gerbils, locusts and chinchillas. The latter escaped one year and spent the rest of their lives living in the walls and chewing anything they could find including my cardboard model of the Severn Bridge. The lab's Ready Room was stuffed with glass jars containing all sorts of strange and pickled specimens some of which are probably illegal now. I also wonder what happened to our jar of Ginger Beer which we left there to 'mature;'; for years after I left I worried that it would explode and shower the room with various bits of leathery biology. It was my job to feed the locusts which involved tearing up handfuls of grass and dropping it in the cage all of which prompted a breeding frenzy. So the general answer to questions of a procreational nature was 'go watch the locusts'.