I’m back home in my little beige room. Today was a good day for food.
This is a family run hotel and the guests get swept up into the family. Christine makes us all little packed lunches that I reckon are identical to the ones her kids used to take to school with them. Sometimes there’s a surprise, like an extra pastry or unusual fruit in the fruit salad. This morning though, she excelled herself. She had run out of ham so she sent me up a hot bacon sandwich, and just to make sure I didn’t miss it she rang me on the room phone and told me. I never normally eat in bed, but I started the weekend with good warm bacon sandwich in bed.
Then into the day which was mostly reading enough stuff that I should end up with a BTec. It’s like being back at school. As one friend said, there’s a structure in place with money to make sure that you have it before you can get it. The gatekeepers want their slice of the pie and they want it first. Greed. There’s so much greed. And the doors are closed until you force them and feed the fatties. There’s not much kindness in the markets. I guess that’s why most of the people you know who have made that the centre of their world are absolute bastards. A couple of decent types might slip through – there are always anomalies. I’m going to get good at it if I can.
And then I was invited to supper and was made to feel welcome in the island and connected to it again. I had a home cooked meal. My first in weeks. We sat round a table and talked and we all know how rare an experience THAT has been this past year and more. I even ended up with a cardigan of my uncle’s, and a wax jacket, dug out of some wardrobe where he left them forever ago. I often think back to that old fucker at Peter’s wake, taking the opportunity for a cheap hit: “Well I suppose this is the end of your family’s connection to our island,” he said with his little hard piggy eyes – maybe a rival of my grandfather’s. Well, no, old man. It fucking well isn’t. Even if I don’t have anywhere to live anymore, it isn’t.
I’m staying in a beige room with free sandwiches for now but who knows what might be possible if I can make sense of this mysterious avalanche of documents that I’ve been dropping hints about for the last fortnight. Tomorrow hopefully I’ll make it to church, and I’m meeting the old man in a coffee shop, likely so he can patronise me and be obstructive again, and tell me he’ll do something but do nothing. His heart is weak, so I’m trying not to stress him out, but the suppression is going to make my own heart explode before long.
I’ll go to my grandfather’s old church and have a good pray. You never know. It might help.
AlBarclay 