Optimism alternates with pessimism. My days are largely unstructured and this may be something I need to change. Getting up later, not making many plans... Drifting. But my spirits are a little better, the view a little brighter, due in no small part I'm sure to the sunny spring weather. I'm meeting my poets' group on Friday after some time. I have no work to show them. Or not yet anyway... I do need to start writing again...
A pair of collared doves is building a nest in the pine tree in our garden. Or the nest may be finished by now. He was busy many days last week, picking up lots of slender twigs from the demise of the leylandii, and flying up to attach them to the platform-like nest I am told they go in for. She was at home, tweaking them into place. We shall watch progress with curiosity and affection. Funny the temptation to feel that birds nesting in a tree in the garden are somehow one's own!
The weekend involved sitting out in the garden for the first time, in hot (yes hot) sunshine; going to a 50th birthday party in a bar with large video screens showing scantily clad, apparently entirely body-hairless young women gyrating alarmingly like pole-dancers, also ads. I don't think L's sister, whose party it was, had requested this, but everyone acted as if it was not happening or was entirely normal. Wallpaper. On another screen was a little show of pics from I's 50 years. Much more entertaining, and a whistle stop tour of fashion through the decades too - she looked just like Princess Diana when she got married in the 80s, with layered flicked back hair, funny hat, jacket with wide lapels, shy smile, looking sideways... In another shot she had wild curls and dungarees and looked for all the world like one of Dexy's Midnight Runners!
To continue with the weekend - it also involved the return visit to IKEA to get (hopefully) the last few items for the house. We had an entertaining time getting there as ever - took motorway going in wrong direction, took wrong turn, missed first roundabout opportunity to get back to right road... Too tired from largely sleepless post party night's sleep to manage the mighty roads of Britain. We saw a man and a little girl walking (twice, before we took the wrong turn, and when we returned) beside the six-lane road, at the junction of about six roads and a motorway, all pollution and noise and metal railings, and Travelodge and roadhouse pub and IKEA. I hate those places in the world - the ones you have ample time to study as you wait at traffic lights for 3 minutes at a stretch... I wished the man would take the girl somewhere else to walk... At IKEA we bought all the items on our list and then ate chips from the dire looking hot dog place near the exit. It all descended to MacDonalds level at this point. I ate them sitting on a curb stone, being studied deeply by a child sitting in a trolley seat, waiting for Dad to come and rescue her, Mum, and siblings from IKEA-world.
Later, we had friends round for dinner, and the Mexican pancakes with soured cream and shredded lettuce, followed by chocolate fudge pudding (my signature dessert) and ice cream, helped erase the memory of the party food that had been our dinner the night before. Pastry pastry pastry and more pastry, and not even nice pastry. Actually there was a bhaji and a samosa and a small chicken chunk, and a slice of French bread. But the rest was soggy pastry all the way.
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