Bergman and I have covered over 1500 miles together already, and that’s taking into account a 3 week period doing Willows where I was pretty static. Today was another epic drive, this time for Lou.
Family is important. Lou’s mum and dad live up near Birmingham. It’s a good three hours from Brighton and occasionally we pretend that I have to deliver something to their local area so we can avoid the social niceties about whether we should go to the effort, and pop in. It’s a couple of days before her mum’s birthday. The opportunity arose. I pretended I was delivering a non specific thing to Birmingham rep. It’s well inside the bounds of possibility based on the shape of my normal day to day. In fact we just went up to see them.
It was lovely, just to sit a while near them. I stuck something up my nose first yaddayadda. Then we talked about the things people talk about without bringing that fucker up.
It’s a long drive though so we couldn’t stay for ages. I didn’t want to have to book an emergency Travelodge after finding myself too tired, especially with the cats waiting.
Worth it for the connection. It must be hard for Lou, with them less mobile now so mostly stuck up there and her down here by the sea without wheels of her own. I’m always happy to enable things if I can. Today, for the price of a long drive, I got to be part of a family momentarily reunited after the year we’ve had. I’m not sure if they were surprised or pleased to see that the actor boyfriend was still on the scene. I was given lots of cake though and felt welcome even though I turned down tea, having arrived with a great big coffee in my hand.
Then we had our mission back to Brighton momentarily diverted by an opportunity to collect a humongous juicer that Lou just bought off eBay from Joyce in Stanmore. It only added about forty minutes to the journey and I’ll likely make all the effort back by getting healthy juices when I least expect them. I haven’t had a look at it, but I think it’s the same as the huge thing Dad brought back from America once in the nineties, from which he made his entire diet for most of the last four years of his life. Arguably it prolonged his life by starving the cancer (and him). It could get juice out of a stone. There will be stonejuice.
Lou found it on eBay last night and it came with all the bits and three books on juicing, box and manual still intact. I’m glad she bought it. It’s what I would have done. Impulse can get you into trouble but it can also bring lovely things to you. And it was only a few hours from her making the payment to the juicer being in the back of Bergman with us. A result.
Tomorrow I’m off back up to London again. I’m gonna be a yoyo for a while until things settle with cats. I have barely had a second to admire the costume haul. The London flat is muted chaos. I have two weeks to do my tax return.
Aargh.
Bed.
AlBarclay 