Just Dreaming . . .

. . . It's something I do quite often now that I don't get out as much as I might wish.  It fills many hours with happy memories, usually backed by photographic evidence such as  this little snapshot taken by my mother about eighty years ago with her Kodak Box Brownie - the camera that brought photography to the masses.  The date is only a guess but I can distinctly remember where and why it was taken - in the back garden of my grandparents' house, about a year before the coronation of King George VI, the father of our present queen.
 
Mum was neither a photography enthusiast nor an artist and the Brownie was only used on special family occasions - and then for just one snap, because she "couldn't afford to waste film" - and it was only brought out on this occasion because she had hand-made those 'beautiful clothes' for me to wear as a page boy at the wedding of her brother, my uncle Hubert, and she persuaded me that they made me look "exactly like that picture in the Pears Soap advertisement", an oil painting popularly known as Bubbles, by the eminent Victorian artist John Everett Millais.
 
One of my neighbours has a fine art print of the original painting on her wall, and kindly invited me in to see it.  Please see my extra today.
 
Phew!  What a stock of memories in that snapshot. (I can also see my tin tricycle in the background!)