A day return
Woke up with an achey kind of cold, but took Lorraine's Cure All of cup of tea and two paracetamol and felt better, if slugs feel at all. Sonia was coming to clear up so I made myself scarce and worked instead in Starbucks on my book for several hours. The best session I have had this week, not that this is saying much. For the last half an hour a tiresome gym instructor on the next table was blaring onto a family, as the mother who had gone to his gym. This gave him permission to give them the benefit of his vacuous opinions in a way that penetrated my Brian Eno filled earphones, and eventually drove me away from the cafe into the gym.
Bumped into Ash, who once owned a restaurant Lorraine and I frequented, and did a mild mannered 30 minutes in the gym. Home again feeling shattered, then up to London to meet colleagues Pat, Barney, Mark and Clare up in the smoke for a bit of fun and networking. Just made it onto the train. At Victoria got out of the train and felt dizzy and weird. Bought some extortionate water in a bottle and drank it. Then decided I was just being a wuss, before pressing on and catching a bus to Oxford Street. However after a few stops of feeling shaky and weird, I decided I really did need to go home.
Walked back to Victoria and came straight home sleeping on the train. Home in the cold to the gold sofa and from the safely of a blanket, requested beans on toast from my lovely Lorraine before watching a decent drama about the making of the first Dr Who episodes, and shuffling off to bed.
Read again a poem Richard sent me in the last few days, written he said thinking of me returning to Guernsey, and his own returns to Northern Ireland. Perhaps all journeys are returns.
THE EXILE
A taxi hurries through lanes
of green-banked-granite stillness,
its hunched driver taciturn, sullen,
solidly steering a wheel that turns
right then left in a vibrancy of air.
Suitcase on knees cradled,
his exile eyes see-saw
from London-grimed leather
to primrose banks at every turn.
Falling in love again, he marvels,
at salt in the wind, small cottages,
a tortoiseshell cat by a blue post-box,
at the lost Lilliputian scale of things
that once appeared
immense.
Richard Fleming
Bumped into Ash, who once owned a restaurant Lorraine and I frequented, and did a mild mannered 30 minutes in the gym. Home again feeling shattered, then up to London to meet colleagues Pat, Barney, Mark and Clare up in the smoke for a bit of fun and networking. Just made it onto the train. At Victoria got out of the train and felt dizzy and weird. Bought some extortionate water in a bottle and drank it. Then decided I was just being a wuss, before pressing on and catching a bus to Oxford Street. However after a few stops of feeling shaky and weird, I decided I really did need to go home.
Walked back to Victoria and came straight home sleeping on the train. Home in the cold to the gold sofa and from the safely of a blanket, requested beans on toast from my lovely Lorraine before watching a decent drama about the making of the first Dr Who episodes, and shuffling off to bed.
Read again a poem Richard sent me in the last few days, written he said thinking of me returning to Guernsey, and his own returns to Northern Ireland. Perhaps all journeys are returns.
THE EXILE
A taxi hurries through lanes
of green-banked-granite stillness,
its hunched driver taciturn, sullen,
solidly steering a wheel that turns
right then left in a vibrancy of air.
Suitcase on knees cradled,
his exile eyes see-saw
from London-grimed leather
to primrose banks at every turn.
Falling in love again, he marvels,
at salt in the wind, small cottages,
a tortoiseshell cat by a blue post-box,
at the lost Lilliputian scale of things
that once appeared
immense.
Richard Fleming
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