Lou’s day off. She is commuting where possible, but the last few nights I’ve been here for Tessy so she can be there for work. We’ve flatswapped. I’ll be here until Wednesday morning. She’s off back to mine tomorrow.
We had a little beach sauna at Lunar Wave in the morning. Half an hour of sitting in a hot box with fifteen women shouting about their children, fitness and investments. Halfway through we wandered down and momentarily threw ourselves into the sea, then back into the soap opera.
It was a start to the day. I wonder if you can comfortably wear ear plugs in the sauna. It’s weird, we are social beings but getting into that heat can be a contemplative and inner experience. I rarely want to go into nattermode when heating up my insides. I don’t know how so many people are just on the bus in there. “Maybe it’s because they have no inner life?” Still it woke me up before my coffee but I got one of them too before we went to Stanmer.
In the car park there I took Lou through her green 2006 Renault Scenic Privilege. It’s a nice first whip. Very Lou. We kept Faithless in the CD changer but now there’s Goldie, Fleetwood Mac, Duran Duran, Santana… She shall have music wherever she goes. Although she’ll likely swap some out for some Satsangs before long and have a vedanta chanty cosmic swamiwagon. Philosophies of the vedas. As long as she doesn’t fall asleep in it, but she’s wired differently to me.
There are little hidden storage spaces all over it. “What good are they apart from to smuggle drugs?” It’s a fair question. But… you can put things in them. It’s a family car so it’s all Top Trumps for long journeys, that sort of thing.
She likes it. I’m relieved, a car isn’t cheap and a first car is a big thing. It smells a bit of air freshener. She thinks maybe it’s to mask an old smoke smell, but that can be overcome and we both grew up in the seventies and eighties when everything and everybody stank of stale smoke, and all the magazines and sports were pushing snouts on all of us. Early nineties Viz spoofed it memorably:
The pong isn’t too bad really, and it’s still the chemical pong of air freshener. Before long the whole thing will smell of dhoop sticks. I’m happy she likes it. I like it. It’s an old car and something might go wrong but right now it jumps off the button.
AlBarclay 