New TIF challenge

It being February there is a new TIF challenge which can be seen here. The colours are not to my taste at all so I think I will go with the main challenge which is 'What are you old enough to remember?'. This is actually quite an exciting theme to work with as if one goes back in stages it is amazing what has happened in a lifetime. I can remember the days before calculators, computers, videos and DVD's, microwaves, and several other things that we now take for granted. My school days would have been completely different had we had calculators and computors but having said that we did actually learn to use our brains and I think learnt more and were more capable than kids of today. My primary school was housed in old Nissan huts and lacked most of the mod. cons. of today but every child leaving there could read, write and do arithmetic. Admittedly only a few passed to the grammar school but they didn't have the same lack of education that today's children have. And very few Mum's worked!

Going back even further my earliest memories are of sitting in a large rubber dinghy at Telscombe Cliffs just after the war. My Dad was in the RAF and this was a retrieved dinghy from a downed plane. It was huge and I look like a small dot in the middle of it! And in the same year I can remember the barbed wire on the beaches which had been put there to stop the invasion and the submarines wrecked in the bay at Gyllyngvase (Falmouth). I must have been between two and three then. One of the wrecked subs was there for years and the conning tower was a good indicator of the state of the tide. There was always a seagull sitting on top of it. Eventually 'health and safety' cleared it away! I was too young to remember this but I've been told that American sailors in Falmouth used to call me Blondie as I had such very blond hair and one gave my Mum a tin of pineapple as he was so struck by my colouring! Pineapple hadn't been seen since the beginning of the war and this was a large catering size tin so Mum gave a beach party to share it around!

So with all these memories what to choose. I would like to do a beach scene with the barbed wire and war ships in the bay. Perhaps planes overhead. But to make it fairly abstract. Whereas I had the twisting, curling vine in my last TIF piece this time I would have twisting, curling barbed wire. I will work on it when I get a moment. I only have two days to get the house presentable before the daughter arrives so won't be for a day or two at least.