SICILY SCENE REVISITED - THE FIRST POST

In a few days' time, this blog will be ten years old,  Between now and the "blog birthday", and with your indulgence, I am going to repost some of the articles that have been popular, have given me great pleasure to write or that have otherwise been significant for readers and for me.

Here, then, is the first short post that kicked off the whole thing. I confess I didn't quite know what I was doing!

Tangerine Land - 21st April 2006

When I was a little girl, in Bristol, England, in the 1950s, you could only get tangerines at Christmas. They were about the most exotic food you could buy and we didn't differentiate between tangerines, mandarins, satsumas or clementines. Any round, orange, citrus fruit that was too small to be an orange was a tangerine!I can still see my father's delighted face as he came home on winter nights and produced a tangerine from each of the pockets of his long, dark blue overcoat. I thought the smell of the tangerine was heavenly and even now, it signifies Christmas for me. I didn't know where the fruit came from but I knew I wanted to go there!

Coincidentally I am writing this almost 33 years to the day since my father's death. How happy he would be to know that I have come to live in the land of the tangerine!