Mother's Day

As I write this, it’s Sunday 14^th March which is Mother’s Day. As a fully paid up Mother, I rejoice.  I’m now the richer by one bottle of sherry (Tio Pepe) a tub of daffodils, some yellow and white daisy-type flowers and a small box of chocolates which are, even as I write, doing the rounds amongst the kids.  What I like about Mother’s Day is that is a little celebration without being too much, you know?  I mean, Christmas takes huge amounts of planning, but Mother’s Day just sort of happens.

Incidentally, you know (to go all churchy on you for a moment) that Our Lady is always shown as wearing a blue cloak?  I remember that used to puzzle me as a kid.  How did anyone know that was Our Lady’s favourite colour?  Did she ever fancy wearing green, say, or something nifty in orange?  I used to feel quite sorry for her, in a way, that she was bound to constant blue and imagined it was a kind of uniform.  They were some explanations; blue is the colour of heaven (blue skies) etc – but here in Manchester, the colour of the sky is, most often, murky grey or white-ish with blotchy bits which, if you painted it, would come up as watered-down Payne’s Grey.  Anyway, that’s all a load of cods.  The real answer to why Our Lady is shown as wearing blue is that, in medieval times, ultramarine was the most expensive, and therefore most highly-prized colour.  I owe this little insight to a fascinating book I’m reading about jewellery. And, I suppose, blue is the colour of a sunny day as well.

It was about five years ago now I was faced with organising a Mother’s Day Mass.  I had a load of random kids and no music.  Not that anyone minded particularly, because, as any Mum knows, what you want to see is your child do their thing.  So, to add rhythm, if not melody, we filled plastic bottles and tins with dried beans, added a couple of drums and a few bells, and let it rip.  It was all very satisfactory and made an agreeable amount of noise, but I was frustrated by the lack of real music.  I pondered about learning the piano.  Now what you really want to happen at this stage is like a scene from a Tom and Jerry cartoon I’ve got on video somewhere, where Tom goes from Lesson One – plink at the keyboard – through to Lesson Ten – plink, plink, plink, plink – to the next scene where he’s at Carnegie Hall, playing Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto.  I wish.  Anyway, we didn’t have room for a piano, so I picked up the guitar.  And now, although there are what you might call subtle but well-marked differences between me and Sergovia – or Eric Clapton, for that matter – I’m perfectly capable of holding my own when it comes to strumming and even do it in public.  And I don’t have to fill plastic bottles with beans anymore.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!