Friday, nothing to say really other than the morning was spent preparing to drive to see my youngest daughter and her partner and the afternoon was spent driving. The drive was the usual flog down three motorways with a single stop but at least the sun shone. On arrival we sat in a sunny garden, drank lemon squash and chatted our way to pizza and an evening of going through lots of things they had brought back from the London house. This included my grandfather’s first world war medals and his army paperwork. After eight years in India as a professional soldier he bought himself out for £35 and avoided being sent to Ireland. At the end of the day we retired to a normal size double bed which was interesting. The alert amongst you will have noted the absence of coffee from the blog. This is because I have given it up. Much as I love a really good cup of coffee it is a variable in increased blood pressure. As my new cancer drug has as its major side effect raised blood pressure (hence the regular monitoring) I thought it wise to drop coffee. It is one thing I can do to help my situation. Once again my need to take what control I can comes to the fore. Always I need to think about what is happening to me and try to use what knowledge I have or can gain to give myself the best chance of the best possible outcome. That I think is what a reasonable, rational, existentially informed adult should do, take responsibility! I take my night meds and settle down for the night in a normal size double bed. Its been a long but satisfying day.
Saturday I wake in the strange bed after a night of my usual cycle of getting up in the night. I take some time to check messages and mail, With that done I catch up with the blog from yesterday and then return to the family to have breakfast. I spend all morning going through albums and packets of photographs along with a lot of documents which capture the history of my family for the last three generations. Unknown facts about relatives come to light and there are hundreds of photographs of some very old relatives and of course of my own history. By lunch time I am bent under the weight of family memories and questions and I am pleased to break and eat lunch with the family in the garden. There is a little more looking at things retrieved from the London house before we go on a trip to one of the lakes in the forest.
We take a sedate stroll around the lake and then indulge in ice cream as we sit at a picnic bench and watch the family of goslings wandering between the benches. One young gosling comes in our direction and pretty soon we have it eating morsels out of our hands. I do not know exactly why there is such a strong urge to make this kind of contact with wild animals but the satisfaction of doing so is immense. Even if it s fleeting there is something special about it. Of course once we ran out of crumbs to feed our gosling it ran back to its peers and returned to following its mother around the lake edge.
We drove back to my youngest daughters house and settled down in various rooms for the rest of the afternoon. I watched the second half of the cup final and then I returned to sorting out more of the oddments of jewellery that needed to be identified. I beavered away at this until it was time to change and drive to the pub for dinner. The Butcher’s Arms is comfortable enough and as its a treat I order stake. The meal is good and the family sit and chat about work, babies, pregnancy, phones and anything else that fell across or paths. A good evening meal indeed. I pay the bill and we return to my daughters where I am massaged with a wicked machine. I am in hope that my birthday might be blessed with such a machine. I check my messages and find a photo of my friend and her family at Pride. They look very happy and having a good time. I recall a conversation I had with her about how lucky I was to be able to take my daughters to Africa to see the big animals n which she reminded me that she could not do that for her daughters as being gay in Africa was in many areas illegal and in some punishable by death. That conversation always put things into perspective for me. I continue to draft the blog while everyone settles down and prepares for an early night. I am perplexed as to what is the best way forward with all this family “treasure”. It feels that I have the responsibility of making sure the family history is preserved and enhanced before I am not around any more to do it. This is where the ripples matter and where for some their ripples peter out. It feels like a big responsibility. I take my meds and go to bed no closer to any answers.
