The slate

Ash has a slate to write on now. He lost the chalk pencils already.

Reminds me of the days when I wrote on a slate in my nursery school at the local Catholic church. But those days, slates had wooden frames unlike the plastic ones now. There is an influx of plastic products in our life since the mid-1980, I think.

Glory to the pre-plastic days, when polythene carrybags and plastic containers and lunch boxes were unheard of. Kids carried their books in a small aluminium box (like a small suitcase in aluminium) and their lunch in aluminium boxes too (until steel entered the scene) or in banana leaves folded and wrapped in a newspaper leaf (rice and side dishes packed in banana leaves still taste divine to me and I get to have them when my mil packs our dinner for the train journey back to Madras).