under another sun

Up just before eight when a man called Andy arrived, and set about installing shelves in a cupboard, and screwing another cupboard to the wall in the utility room, and going on later in the morning to make new bookshelves from adapting my other bookshelves into my study.  I left to go up to Edgware, before most of this was done, pausing only to help Andy move a bookshelf and banging my eye socket painfully.  Then the four trains to Edgware to see Mum and Mas. Caught the wrong Edgware bus at Mill Hill Broadway, and it took me through Burnt Oak, somewhere I'd not been for years. It had changed since I last was there, with the high street shops all changed reflecting changes in populace, with greengrocers with exotic veggies, and at least on grocery with Arabic script. Got off at the crossroads, and walked up Stonegrove and through the little alley onto Kings Drive.   Today the new car was signed over to Mum, the neighbour came and very kindly logged onto the government site...

A hot night, in this unseasonal heatwave, and we slept with the windows open. Something buzzing around my head in the night, probably a moth. We got up for an early breakfast, before working more on the seven poems, and Lorraine made ready to drive off to Ashford to collect Pat and Maureen to come to stay.  I broke off for an iced coffee and gossip with Yvonne at 11 sitting outside the Grumpy Chef for an hour, felt a hand on my back, and Jane passed to say hello. Glimpsed what I thought was a large clown out of the corner of my eye, turns out it was a tall older woman wearing a long white dress with splashes of primary colour on it.  Home a salad lunch and trying to to hone the poems without losing their spontaneity and life. Then to the gym again. As yesterday, pleasant to lurk in the cool of the air-conditioned room, and unlike yesterday there were not muscular schoolboys swarming on the weights. I trundled on the cross trainer listening to The Rest Is Politics.   ...