The pansy post

one of my pansies

My blogging guru Penelope Trunk says you should not blog about things outside your area - like if your area is dogs, don't suddenly start talking about pansies because people are coming to your blog to read about dogs, not pansies. She says you can be lateral - like if you can think of a way to make pansies relate to dogs, so that dogs is still the main topic, that's ok. My problem is I don't know what my topic is. I don't have a topic. But today my topic is pansies.

I love pansies. I love everything about them - they are cheap to buy, easy to grow, they flower for ages, and you can even eat them. They look beautiful in salads and as cake decorations. I don't have any pictures to show you of my pansy salads and cake decorations as I have never used them for that - I just like knowing that I can. I like thinking about using them for those purposes.

Guess what I just realised? I am often writing about the topic of class - in my previous blog (no longer active) I wrote a lot of posts about it. And I know how pansies relate to class. Flowers say a lot about class. Pansies used to mean you were probably lower class - because they are cheap, easy to grow and they flower for ages. If you were lower class, you would not eat them though, because only middle-upper class people eat flowers. Poor people feel poor if they eat weeds and flowers, but rich people feel even richer when they can eat weeds and flowers and not feel poor. It's a novelty, it's not about survival. I think because you can eat pansies and use them as pretty cake decorations, they have become a middle-upper class flower. Isn't it nice to know that flowers can transcend class? Begonias have done this also. Begonias used to be suburban, lower class flowers because they were cheap, easy to grow and flowered for ages. They were also, small, stubby and ugly. Now there are so many fancy types of begonias like these and you see them in rich people's gardens. But now I am confusing wealth with class. I think you know the difference so I am not going to insult you by explaining. I think only upper-middle class people read my blog, because that is what I am. You won't believe how many flowers I had to go through to finally realise that.