China from China: Why Memory Lane Leads to the Chinese Supermarket

I have always loved visiting Chinese supermarkets. If I never visited another Asda, Sainsbury's or Tesco again it would be too soon (can just about tolerate Aldi), but for me, Chinese supermarkets are an experience worlds apart from the drudgery of the Western weekly shop.

I used to live in Chorley in Lancashire until I was nine years-old, and I can vividly recall many occasions where my dad would take me and my brother into Manchester's Chinatown on a Saturday. I remember nothing about Manchester city centre but Chinatown, the largest in the country. There my dad had a favourite supermarket - which was actually a smallish shop packed to the rafters - and above the shop was the same family's popular restaurant. This shop sold delicious dumplings and meats, fresh vegetables and dried beans, spices and curries. It stocked tins with labels I couldn't make out, more exotic teas than I had ever seen in my life, and noodles. So many noodles! 

I quickly learned where to locate my dad's store cupboard items. To this day he remains a talented and enthusiastic cook, and while we enjoyed the odd takeaway as much as any other family when I was growing up, his home cooked chinese was a real occasion. It was my job to set the table every evening, and Chinese meals warranted tealight table warmers, chopsticks and knives and forks, and a kitchen roll plonked elegantly in the middle for sticky fingers. Once I even 'borrowed' four mismatched flannels from the bathroom, plopped them in bowls of warm water and proudly presented them to my family after the spare ribs...

When I moved to Leeds as a student it was a comfort to me to locate the Chinese supermarket as quickly as possible, buying a huge tub of black beans which would last my three years. That shop has since moved to shiny new premises, but I thought the original shop I found behind Leeds Markets had far more character and certainly a warmer welcome (and cheaper prices too). 

These days the grown up me has shifted focus a little on visits to Sheffield's Chinese supermarket. You see, I have discovered the joys of crockery. These bowls, 75p each plus VAT, are exotic with a look not out of place among my great grandmother's Chinese tea set, so into my basket they leapt. A delightful spoon with a fish... 80p.

...And the tea section is very alluring these days. Gunpowder Tea? Seven year-old me would have loved the idea of such a drink, surely sipped by Chinese pirates. What if I explode!

So home I come with bargainous treasures, and to a rather different sort of afternoon tea (for which I still lay the table). Great Grandmother's china, (complete with rather more delicate china spoons than my delightful fish, but still), gunpowder tea, and maybe even a fortune cookie, because I haven't grown out of those either.

My fortune cookie worked so well, I won the Chinese lottery! Or maybe I bought a pack of lucky paper money for 50p, thinking it would make a fun addition to my smash book or a #PostCircle letter.

It's funny how even now, I tend to visit Chinese supermarkets with my dad. Just me and him. And even now I leave him to choose his store cupboard favourites. I offer no opinion, as I might in Asda. I simply breathe in the familiar smell of aniseed, and follow my feet to look at the pretty teapots, smiling to myself as I think of the scrumptious childhood favourites in store that evening.

Do you use Chinese supermarkets? 

Guest Post: Beautiful Clutter on Vintage Children's Books

Welcoming my good friend, fellow tea supper and collector of pretty treasures, Jem, of Beautiful Clutter...

Charity shops in general can be treasure troves for magpies like me, but charity bookshops are fantastic places!  Books have been my chief addiction for as long as I can remember, as a child it didn’t take me long to work out that by hunting for the books I wanted in the local charity bookshop my pocket money would stretch that much further.  Today these are where I tend to find most of the vintage and retro children’s books I come home with – especially with jumbles and car boot sales thin on the ground in my area.

My reading diet is generally a mixture of classics, contemporary fiction and fantasy – so the old children’s books I find are a brilliant palate cleanser between lengthier reads, besides which they put me in such a cheerful mood. I recently re-read my whole Beatrix Potter collection – one of the many things Anna and I have in common is a love of Miss Potter – as a January blues beater, and it worked! I think the NHS ought to look into handing out bundles of half a dozen childhood favourites to everyone having a miserable time in hospital, I can’t testify to their effectiveness as a painkiller but as a mood-booster they score very well!

With anything second (or third, or fourth!) hand comes a quirk or two; I’ll often find an exuberant crayon annotation, dog-eared pages, or a handwritten dedication on the inside front cover. Once I found a perfectly flat daisy, obviously left over from a flower-pressing experiment, in the middle of an Enid Blyton book, which made my heart sing.  These little things just add to the charm, because in general old copies of children’s books are beautiful things – the vivid covers, the illustrations inside, even the typography - are all wonderfully nostalgic. It seems funny to say that when most of the books I pick up were printed decades before I came into the world, but I’ve always felt I was  born into the wrong era!

There is a line in one of my favourite films ‘You’ve Got Mail’ from Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan) the owner of The Shop Around the Corner. Her children’s bookshop in New York is under threat of closure with a behemoth of a discount bookstore opening across the street, she said something that has always stayed with me:

‘I started helping my mother after school here when I was six years old. And I used to watch her. And it wasn’t just that she was selling books, it was that she was helping people become whoever it was (that) they were going to turn out to be. Because when you read a book as a child it becomes part of your identity in a way no other reading in your whole life does . . .’ 

To my mind she hit the nail right on the head, and I think that goes some way to explaining why children’s books are so very special!

Thank you for taking the time to read my ramble! Another thank you to Anna for having me, I hope she is having a lovely time of her well-earned break!

Jem xXx

Oh Jem, you write so poetically about the wonders of these childhood delights! A whole world within each, with many more memories besides. I'm off to lovingly stroke my Enid Blyton collection. Thank you for sharing your lovely collection with us.

Pressed Flowers: Reminders of Summer

As a child I remember my nan showing me how to press flowers. We would carefully place them between sheets of newspaper then stack a huge pile of books on top before I had to practice that quality which children find so difficult: patience.

After two weeks I would be able to go and unveil the final result; papery, delicate works of art, nature preserved for ever more. 

I've been doing a lot of walking in overgrown woodland this summer on my adventures with Beatrix, and it occurred to me that perhaps it was time to have another go at flower pressing. I really love the idea of being able to pick a piece of summer 2012, preserve it, and then keep it forever, and it will never wilt and die. 

I used the same heavy stack of encyclopedias as all those years ago, made my makeshift flower press, and attempted to get on with other creative projects for the next fortnight while I waited.

One of the flowers emerged looking like a miniature bent blossom tree, so I popped it inside my sketch book ready to make it into just that. The rest I used to make my first ever smash book page. (More on this new pursuit soon!)

Sticking such precise and perfect specimens of nature in a haphazard way somehow seemed really satisfying,  and helps to give the overall impression of a chaotic bouquet on the page. I haven't finished the page yet, but I'm already enjoying being able to look at and touch a piece of the summer, created in the summer, and caught in a single moment in time for ever more. 

(My new washi tape was great fun too!)

Do you have any childhood crafts or hobbies you'd like to revisit now? I'm considering starting a ladybird farm next!