Here We Go

I saw my Mum in her new setting on Saturday, and took her her white lilies. She was in bed, complaining of having no energy. She's safe and looked after and it is a decent place, is the good news. She is not interested in much, and is being rude to the other residents (when she gets up), is the bad. My own emotions too complex to attempt to relay here at the moment. A kind of grieving. Several kinds maybe.

I combined my visit with spending time with my dear friend rr. Who makes a mean spinach pesto it has to be said. And played me some interesting kora jazz. We talked much and played with an app relating to Bjork and David Attenborough.



My car has been restored to me after being pranged while parked, by a neighbour, last week and carried off on a transporter. All shiny and good as new - or good as before at any rate, which for a ten-year old car is about as much as can be expected. Goodbye to the white Fiesta, which smelt funny and had a manual gearbox. Too much strangeness.

It is autumn and windy, and I went out for my walk this morning wearing a woolly hat and gloves. Here we go.

Stop Making Sense

Fantasising about finding a way to use language that doesn't make sense but still resonates. Because I suppose I get very tired of making sense, or trying to.

Strange driving to work in a white Ford Fiesta not mine, with a manual gearbox, having to dig in my brain for those old skills, left foot pressing clutch, left hand shifting gear stick, knowing when to, remembering to, when first, when second, when depress clutch, when lift it, when apply hand brake. Body tense, the drive twice as tiring.

Awake half the night. The strange white car. The strange place where my mother is now housed. Imagining arriving with white lilies, asking for a vase.

Out Of Hand

And sometimes it all gets a bit out of hand. It flies across the distance between us like a slippery ball-bearing, wild and potentially dangerous.

Too much family in my face right now, trying to manage things with my siblings from here across the Channel, down the country. All the young people in transition, my mother in transition. My sister about to have an empty nest. Not sure what I'm about to have.

Wood burner going again anyway and pyjamas on. If in doubt, these, and wine, and 6 Music, and a bath.

Boards

Rain. A lot of rain this morning, and a slidy clay mud path along the edge of the inexplicable pit dug right next to the building where I work began the day with more challenge than I needed the day my Mum moved into a care home. Is this a metaphor for what we do here? I wondered. Boards were provided for students to walk somewhat safely to their appointments. They teetered and slid along and arrived with almost mud free shoes unlike my own which sat and dried on some cardboard in my room, while I conducted all sessions in my socks, only rather late in the day wondering if this seemed strange to the girls far too polite to say if so.

Watering the courgettes and beans and rocket, and dead-heading the petunias, in my pyjama trousers, Sleepio t shirt and favourite red and black check cardigan, as the sky briefly puts on a display of glorious flung cloud laced with pink. Walking around the gable end I feel the sun's heat radiating back at me from the stones that have absorbed it all day.

Night

Night, though so early, and I turn a daddy longlegs away at the door. Shoes, long trousers, jacket. All these strange items re-entering my field of awareness. There is nothing in this world but change.

First

I have just lit the woodburner for the first time of the season. I don't seem to have lost my touch.

Radio 6 music for company. Goldfrapp choosing lovely records - currently Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie. One of those tracks that makes you think you never need to hear anything else again ever.

Outside wind.

I am alone and cooking a chicken breast that I felt might be slightly past its sell by date, but have decided (guided by the nose) that it's ok. Marinaded in lemon juice, olive oil, chillie and garlic from the allotment. Cooking Charlotte potatoes also from the plot, chard and broad beans ditto. Considering pudding. Oral comforts for me. And the fire.

Can't get my brother to communicate about his latest experience, taking my Mum to visit the care home we like. I know he'll reappear but hard to wait at this crucial stage.

Drinking my mother's White Burgundy. Cheers, Mum.