Confessions of a plate spinner

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.  These days my politics seems to be slightly left of centre. The centre has extra lipstick these days, thanks to crazed right wing Populists and so on. 

Then back to lurk in the garden for half an hour thinking about poems a bit more. Amazing liberty I have. So easy to take it for granted. 

Lorraine arrived home with Pat and Maureen who are coming to stay for a few days. Pat nauseous after the drive, and has a cough. We ate, sandwiches for Pat and Maureen, and I cooked a chicken, mushroom and padrón pepper curry. Very simply done, stir fried together, and then ladled in some amazing dhal that Lorraine had made yesterday, so it was a bit like a dhansak. Then L and I wandering out to water our tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies and aubergines at sundown in the glasshouse.

Even though I don't feel objectively very busy I am noticing the phenomenon of information overload, the feeling that there is an impossible amount to be understood. Even the poem I'm writing is an interlinked sequence of seven poems and is making my brain ache, my must-read book pile is so vast that at certain times it all bottlenecks and I end up reading nothing at all and staring at my phone instead which itself is just an unquenchable source of often mindless information too. 

Lorraine and I were meditating recently for a bit, but busyness took over. We need to start this again.  I feel a need to simplify and do one thing after another. Mentally I seem to be plate spinning somewhat.  

I am reading The Wind in the Willows to Lorraine before we sleep. I've not read that book since childhood. Beautifully written, and quite funny too, in that Edwardian way. Beautifully illustrated by E.H. Shepard.