It’s been an eventful first day back here: first, Mark and I were catching up with each other and then with some household chores. I mentioned the lawn (incidentally I can never say the word ‘lawn’ without hearing Tom Conti’s drunken voice in my ear saying ‘then you have to give us the lawn ornaments’ – anyone who knows where that comes from please comment below) and how the grass was growing high, perhaps not as high as an elephant’s eye but certainly as high as a sparrow’s throat. He agreed that he would in fact tackle the lawn. I got out the mower, connected it to the extension lead, switched it on and – nothing. Just a hiccough and then it was dead. I checked the extension, the plug, changed the fuse and still nothing. I emailed the house owner, who said that the garden tools are not in fact part of the tenancy (I’ll have to check this out) so now we’re a bit stuck. Anyone have a spare mower?
It’s bloody typical that, on only the second occasion when I’ve got Mark to agree to mow the lawn, the bloody thing conks out. Anyway, I decided that as we were out of bread and loo rolls I would make some bread (I have yet to discover how to make loo rolls) and discovered that we were out of yeast. A trip to Green and Pleasant was in order, and as I tripped down Queens Rd burdened by the surplus medicines Daniel has not used, to take to the chemist, and as I passed Fingerprints I saw a finger beckoning me. And lo! it was Chris Conway and a couple of chums holding their occasional pop-up lunch club. I went in to join them for a spell and talk about gigs and filk and poetry and stuff.
After the bread was rising I turned to my memoir. The first ten thousand words are almost ready to go. It goes without saying that I think they are turgid rubbish because I think that about every piece of prose I write, no matter how good it seemed as I was writing it. In fact I think there may be an inverse law here somewhere: that the better a piece of writing seems as you’re writing it, the more it will appear on re-examination, to be sewage.
C’est la vie!
Mark returned from his foraging with loo rolls, so the sewage problem can at least be contained.
The memoir will go off next week, or at least the first ten thousand words will, come hell or contaminated water…
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 