A Jug in the Bedroom......

.....gently shakes.

I love hearing old stories about the past. In the late 1950's early 1960's my father worked on the railway and as a child he'd keep me entertained with many tales of the characters he worked with and things that happened(usually a derailment or two, I think my dad was accident prone Though I was traumatised by the naked man showering story, probably more so than the hundreds of passengers who happened to be passing on the London express at the time ).
To me as a very young boy it didn't sound like work but an adventure and I also got a sense that my dad missed those days so very much. He's told me many other stories about his life, on farms, memories of the war and of my Grandfathers action at Dunkirk and the liberation of Italy. Sadly I never met my Grandfather but my dad's stories mean I get a window with which he can live on...and then I'll be a window for my children

Night Mail

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

(W H Auden)

Full poem [link]

This piece came about by accident, it was an off cut of another painting and I noticed the spilt blobs formed a shape which gave me the idea and I just added the cloth cap and pipe(my dad didn't smoke a pipe, bit of artistic licence there)