I first knew of the word periwinkle as a little shelled sea creature, delicious to eat. I remember my grandfather, and my dad, eating them, using a winkle pin to pull the curly little mollusc from its shell, and eating them with brown bread and butter…for some reason it had to be brown bread, cut very thin, and maybe a dash of vinegar. I like periwinkles, or winkles as we used to call them, very much although it’s years since I actually ate any.
Then I came across periwinkles as a garden plant; we bought some from a nursery and tried to grow them, not very successfully. Our neighbour Jean had them rampant in her garden, quite a pest, she said… they failed to thrive with us, until we moved here, and now we too have rampant periwinkles.
However, whenever I mention periwinkles or think about them or see them, I remember a friend suddenly saying, as we were struggling over our French while doing our degrees, “Le ciel etait bleu comme une pervenche!” He had been taught this at school when leaning how to use similes in French. I wondered if this was a common saying, or just a random thing the teacher had used, but when I looked it up I came across a poem “Le ciel est bleu comme une orange”…. which I guess is derived from another poem “La terre est bleu comme une orange” by Paul Eluard…
La terre est bleue
La terre est bleue comme une orange
Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas
Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter
Au tour des baisers de s’entendre
Les fous et les amours
Elle sa bouche d’alliance
Tous les secrets tous les sourires
Et quels vêtements d’indulgence
À la croire toute nue.
Les guêpes fleurissent vert
L’aube se passe autour du cou
Un collier de fenêtres
Des ailes couvrent les feuilles
Tu as toutes les joies solaires
Tout le soleil sur la terre
Sur les chemins de ta beauté.
Paul Eluard, L’amour la poésie, 1929
Lois Elsden 
It’s Greek to me!
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It didn’t really help that I spelt it wrong and didn’t notice until the second after a pressed ‘publish’! Do you remember winkles?
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My response was a joke about the French not your misspelling. Canada is officially bilingual but few people outside of Quebec can speak it. Never tried periwinkles as a boy in England because my Dad hated them and wouldn’t buy them. Just the thought of having to eat them makes me gag though. There goes my tough guy personna.
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You wimp!;)
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Just the response I expected from a Wannabee biker chic!
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LOL!!!
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Mick thinks it may be from a poem by Lamartin as it rang a vague bell
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I’ll try and track it down… The ciel wasn’t very bleu today, in fact it was very gris aujourd’hui!
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Comme chez nous! By the way it’s Lamartine, not Lamartin and Mick now thinks it might be a quote from Victor Hugo.
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