Saturday, April 21, 2007

Cherry Blossom

When I was a kid, I would love Spring. Looking out for crocuses and daffodils, walking to the farm with my mam to buy eggs and looking out for cherry blossoms and looking up into the massive beech trees and becoming giddy at the size of them... my mam would call me her cherry blossom... awww.

Oh, how all that has changed. The farm is now a big business 'farm shop' buying in eggs instead of having laying hens, thankfully they got rid of the pigs* years ago but the cherry trees that we used to look at have all been cut down.

Anyway, the point to this post: when I was a kid, I would have given my eye teeth to have hay fever. No, seriously.

If you had hay fever you would be able to get out of P.E. and the dreaded cross-country. As I went to two schools which had rather large grounds, our cross-countries (which we had once a week) were the stuff of nightmares. So why is it as I've got older I now find I suffer when the first blossoms hit the trees? For the past few years it's been hell, excaberated by the fact there's three cherry trees outside my bedroom window and a hawthorn that doesn't seem to realise it's meant to flower in May.

Yesterday was particularly bad. I had to go out to meet my Uncle and everywhere I went, every garden I passed had a flowering cherry in it.

As much as I love looking at the blossom, I really curse the tree pollen. No amount of Max Factor foundation will disguise how pink my nose is at the moment.






* when I was at junior school, if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction we'd have to have an 'inside' break... the smell of the pig swill would be that overpowering, kids would be practically keeling over

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