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Tuesday 21 March 2017

Scrapbook day

For complex reasons VR's birthday falls on a diet day and the celebrations are muted as we hang around, feeling the cold invade our bodies deprived of calories. I buy her a bonsai plus a Beatrix Potter owl pendant which I (brilliantly) imagine can be draped round the branches in decoration. But VR says the pendant is "good enough to wear" and I have mixed feelings about that. Instructions accompanying the bonsai suggest the mini-tree will be a demanding companion and we might as well have had a baby (I jest). Seamus Heaney's poetic translation of Aeneid VI represents a less equivocal prezzie.

I reflect on times since 1959, mostly repeats, I fear.

In London, that year, we both have Thursday off. We take the Metropolitan Line westwards, get off and walk to Amersham. Misty October, the month Britain does incomparably. Decades later I recall the day’s tactility and write a SONNET. Not my best but heartfelt.

Evening omelettes in Soho. Beyond the restaurant window a lady of the night disappears and reappears, plying her trade. We watch detachedly, unembarrassed by each other.

Delivery room, Charing Cross hospital, London. I hold VR's hand but heat and an incautious midnight hamburger combine to make me queasy and I'm sent to the viewing window. A nurse says, "It's a girl".

California: finalising a book for publication (It's about valves.). I drive a hired Dodge Charger between redwoods worried we're running out of gas.

Linden Crescent, Kingston-upon-Thames, our first owned house, December. The plumber’s finished and switches on the new central heating. To Hell with open fires.

Anytime. VR makes Eggs Mornay.

Along the Loire Valley, France, in the newly acquired Scirocco. Beethoven’s Andante Favori playing from a cassette. View and music in harmony.

Anytime. Me writing, VR fiddling with the Hudl.

5 comments:

  1. Lobbing love grenades. Irresistible.

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  2. MikeM: At this distance in time they represent a chain of thousand-dollar mattresses, stuffed with swansdown, on which I may lie and close my eyes. Revelling in the sharpness of the images.

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  3. Brr, nothing quite like that March chill to sink into the bones, a pity you couldn't waive the diet day, birthdays coming but once a year. Still, doubtless an appropriately delicious day will soon be had in lieu. My best love and best wishes to her.

    The very name of Amersham in my childhood always had a slight air of excitement, as it was the only place in the region that had an indoor heated swimming pool, so rare and costly in those times that it was reserved for special birthday treats.

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  4. Lucy: We'd just done a fortnight dietless because of the Borderlines. We'd made a pact that we would lunch out on the following Tuesday at a restaurant that had previously disappointed us, give it another chance. It disappointed us again but neither felt resentful; we could now, as my mother might have said, "chalk it off".

    We both appreciate the love and wishes.

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