Comfort and Memory

A quiet encounter in the present

I sat in the quiet hush of the café, watching the heart float warm upon the velvety crest of my morning coffee. On the table before me—acting as a modest utensil holder—sat a recycled tin of Lyle’s Black Treacle. Vivid red, proud, and bold, its presence was a quiet grace in a modern space. But looking at that lion, guarded by its gold, my mind didn’t stay in the café. It reached back into the earliest landscapes of my childhood.

The legend on the shelf

The brand emblem on the tin of Lyle’s Treacle has held my imagination for as long as I’ve had memories to reach back into. It was always there in my grandparents’ kitchen—quiet, dependable, slightly mysterious—sitting on a shelf above the place where my grandmother worked her small miracles with flour, butter, and warmth. Always two types, each in their distinctive tins, both featuring the Lyle’s lion and bee motto: a green and gold tin for the Golden Syrup, and the vivid red tin you see here, containing the dark and mysterious Black Treacle.

Treacle was the gift of sweetness in so many of the things she baked. As a boy, I would climb onto a kitchen chair and wait with a kind of reverence for the moment she’d hand me the spoon, still coated with that dark, glossy syrup. The sweetness was intense, almost overwhelming, but it tasted like home, like safety, like being known.

The lion and the bees

And always, on the tin, that strange image: a lion unmistakably dead, bees nesting in its ribcage, and beneath it the motto that puzzled and comforted me in equal measure—“Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” I didn’t understand its biblical origin then, but I didn’t need to. The words felt like a spell, a promise that gentleness could emerge from unlikely places, that sweetness could survive even inside something fierce or broken.

That emblem became part of the emotional architecture of my childhood. It was mythic without being frightening, a little odd but somehow reassuring. It taught me, long before I had the language for it, that beauty often hides in contradictions.

Echoes of the past

Though Lyle’s finally altered their iconic logo in 2024, ending a 140-year streak, the original lion lives on unchanged in memory. Glancing back at the red tin on my café table, the noise of the modern world fades for a second longer. Some emblems don’t just mark a product; they anchor the quiet rituals that shape our earliest understanding of love.

A Kitchen Blessing with Love To Grandma

In the small warm room
the clock kept its island time —
tick, tide, tick.
My grandmother’s hands
worked flour into light.
A hush of sweetness rose.
I waited on the chair,
a boy held in the harbour
of her quiet labour.
Then the spoon—
dark with treacle,
bright with love—
placed in my open hands.
And the whole house
seemed to breathe once,
soft as a prayer.

Błogosławieństwo z kuchni — Babci

W małym, ciepłym pokoju
zegar odmierzał swój własny, osobny czas —
cyk, fala, cyk.
Ręce mojej babci
przemieniały mąkę w światło.
Cichy obłok słodyczy unosił się w powietrzu.
Czekałem na krześle,
chłopiec bezpieczny w przystani
jej cichej pracy.
A potem łyżka —
ciemna od melasy,
jasna od miłości —
podana w moje otwarte dłonie.
I cały dom
zdawał się odetchnąć jeden raz,
miękko jak pacierz.