Wednesday and I wake early and before I can sink into my usual rousing routine I find myself in the shower. It’s a powerful rain shower and very warming. It’s one of the upgrades to the apartment along with it being a walk in shower. It makes me wonder if we should take to bath out at home and install a walk in one. Once showered I make warm drinks for my partner and I and return to bed.
Breakfast is eaten to the accompaniment of the sea rolling the giant pebbles around just across from our apartment. my partner re-plaits my hair in readiness for our first walk into the village.
After I am braided we go for a walk to the post box and then to the chemist, I am desperate for a nail file and clippers as I have split a nail and its really irritating as I keep catching it on my clothes. I am lucky and find all I need and we are able to move on to the next shop to get the odds and ends we need to survive, like dishwasher tablets. On the way back there were the most enormous lilies in a front garden, I’d not seen them so large before and assume the southerly climate favours them.
The shopping is dropped into the apartment as is two layers of clothing, the sun is out and its quite warm, With the adjustments made we head for the café round the corner for raspberry lemonade and a massive warm fruit scone with all the trimmings. Its a real treat and I am fascinated by the local people who are coming in and out. Back at the apartment I do the days crosswords, while my partner reads on the patio in the sunshine. So time passes until it’s time for the ice cream walk. Donning the most comfortable shoes I can manage my partner and I walk to the promenade and look out over the sea under a blue sky.
We walk the back way to overlook the back of the pebble ridge and on the way discover an extraordinary facility, a self service dog wash: I kid you not! How a dog manages it is beyond me but there it was as bold as brass and here is the picture to prove it.
Can only be a matter of time before someone tries to use it on a child. My partner and i have done the required time out and about and head for the ice cream van back along the sea front and there we sit 99’s in hand and and just watch the sea. It’s looking bluer today and I reflect that, unlike furniture and other objects I cannot grasp its shape or weight, I find it difficult to get a “sense” of it and I find that mildly disturbing. We watch it for a long time.
Once again back at the apartment I settle down and send birthday flowers to my sons partner in Stockholm and then I set about drafting the blog, while my partner makes tea for us, pate to start and pasta to finish. And so the evening begins and for the first time in days I can begin to feel a poem sloshing about inside me, not formed yet but gradually forming adn incubating. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe never, I just have to wait and see. In the mean time I shall eat, read, watch TV until its time for my meds and all the other bedtime rituals that I am locked into at the moment as part of my war on the cancer and the other minor skirmishes around my body.
