GRANDAD'S SLIDES (PART 49) - MYSTERIOUS BLUE BOX

SLIDE 0450

Chalet, Spiez, 1957

A random picture of a chalet, or perhaps a small hotel, is sandwiched alone between two far better pictures.

Hence its isolation here - not due to any particular merits that the picture itself might possess, although that vivid Kodachrome green does rather draw the eye., and yet I suspect that it was the tree, and perhaps the flowers on the balcony, that drew the photographer's eye on that long-forgotten day.

I made a model of a chalet once. I can't remember now whether it was a "Blue Peter" thing or a School Project thing. Whichever it was, I recall that you had to mark out a template in cardboard, fold it and glue it into shape and then cover the outside walls with either matchsticks or pieces of straws to make the logs, and used the seed pods from pine cones to make the shingles for the roof.

All very effective once you applied a little brown paint, and I do seem to remember that those coverings made the whole thing rather robust and it hung around in my bedroom for years. It may even have added to the scenery on my train set for a time, before finally disappearing like so many of the bits and pieces of childhood have a tendency to.

I seem to remember that people used to make chalet jewellery boxes once upon a long ago, too, using overlapping lolly sticks to form a square box and stepping them in to form a twin apex roof. I used to like those, but I don't suppose anyone bothers doing that sort of thing any more.

I think my Grandparents really liked Switzerland, even though I don't recollect too much enthusing about my own visit there when I was ten. They had a picture on the wall for years which showed a chalet with the Jungfrau mountain behind it, and cuckoo clocks always seemed to please them.

Strangely enough, though, it's only by scanning these pictures that I've come to really realise that they actually went there, even though the various souvenirs around their house obviously suggested that they had.

It seems that we were always an oddly undemonstrative bunch, the lot of us.