Calling all hedgehogs
#wrightwritesnow 85
Back in the Late Middle Ages, when smoking cigarettes was not reprehensible and bad fashion mattered even less, most smokers used matches to light their cigarettes. So, there was no shortage of little boxes of matches.
As kids, we used to collect empty matchboxes and make clunky items of furniture out of them: chests of drawers, armchairs, sofas, that sort of thing. We would glue them together with flour and water paste. We had to walk two miles barefoot with a bucket to collect the water. That last bit is not true, but the rest is, so far.
Fast-forward to our young adult life, when one still switched the television off when someone happened to visit, and we were all adept at entertaining each other in pubs. One night, my sister, a non-smoker, took my matches from where they were on top of my pack of cigarettes on the counter.
She asked those present, “How do you call all hedgehogs?” My memory is foggy about what prompted this, but it could easily have been a session of people imitating the sounds of doves cooing, or vervet monkeys, or doing their best Donald Duck impression or similar.
No one had a clue. I looked at her husband-to-be, and he shrugged silently.
By way of an answer, my sister took a single match most of the way out of the matchbox, and closed the box. She held it up to her mouth as if it were a walkie-talkie radio, pressed an imaginary button, and said, “Calling all hedgehogs, calling all hedgehogs!”.
Such hilarity ensued that I am laughing as I write. So silly!
Lucy Pepper wrote a good post today on the lack of Government preparedness—once again—for the forest fires that plague Portugal every summer without fail, but seem worse this year. In that post, she mentioned, “the odd hedgehog with a box of matches”, without knowing that this was even a thing. Anyway, that’s the reason for my drawing, which I did not think I could do, but Lucy insisted I could.
