It’s something my son said to me during one of our chats.
We were walking- maybe to the shops. I know the sun was warm and the bees were bumbling in the privet flowers. We allowed our feet to guide us. Our conversation meandered through the Large Hadron Collider, took a wander along ball bearings and dabbled its feet in the merits of baked beans over broccoli. (Can beans really be described as a vegetable: discuss.) We never got to the bottom of that knotty problem- perhaps we never will, but somehow my son spoke the ‘fishes and stones’ phrase in reference to me.
Now, I’m not saying he’s right. I own a few fossils, the odd chunk of mineral- ammonites, trilobites and anything shiny, if you’re wondering. But fish? I don’t know a hake from a halibut, a Cahaba shiner from a coelacanth.
But I do know a beautiful phrase when I hear one, and his words have stuck in my head ever since.
Other things I know:
How to salsa- badly.
How to make a wedding bouquet- passably.
That my belly button makes the perfect cup for a single Malteser , potentially two- please don’t ask.
The other thing, the thing that keeps me strapped to my laptop, that has me scribbling notes on the bus and earwigging conversations in the checkout queue, is that I’d like to give up the day job and write for a living.
And if anyone has an answer for the baked beans dilemma…
If you’d like to read some of my early short fiction and help to support The Alzheimer’s Society in the process, go to http://www.pewter-rose-press.com/store/store.html#StillMe and purchase Still Me, an anthology of short stories and poetry by the writing group All Write Then.
Word Shamble 
As nobody else wants put their six eggs in, I will:
Baked beans as a vegetable is really stretching the term. It’s like calling spaghetti hoops pasta. The beans (or the hoops) without the sauce would fall into the vegetable (/pasta) category… I suppose. I’d rather call haricot beans pulses.
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At last! Someone willing to stick their neck out on the beans question. After much consideration, I think I agree with you. Though are all beans actually vegetables anyway, pulse being a subsection of the veg category which happens to be high in protein. The problem continues. And my son is still hooked on beans 🙂
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