Teaspoons

Tucked into various spaces around the house is all sorts of junk which has managed to keep pace with my wanderings over the years. Much of it hardly ever sees the light of day but, every now and again, I find it and it brings memories flooding back.

I have a small collection of these teaspoons in the little brown case which has accompanied me through almost all my life - see post here. They belonged to my mother and reflect the two sides of her life. The upper one is an apostle teaspoon of a British design which dates back hundreds of years while the lower, much cruder one was made in Zanzibar with a clove instead of an apostle.

I don't think my mother was ever really happy in the UK. Having been brought up in Burma and England, as a young woman she leapt at the chance of a job in Zanzibar. I have always thought that it was there and, later, in Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa that she had the happiest years of her life. So the apostle spoon celebrates her dull British years while the clove spoon remembers her happy, exotic years.