Small town stuff

How did today come to seem so busy? In fact, a minute ago I found myself thinking it was Saturday (though in fact it has become Saturday while I wrote that) - but it's been Friday, I know, because it began with the 8am shopping run to pick up the messages. The girl loading them into my boot asked if I'd like to do it so that she could attend to another customer, but I told her I thought not and sat down firmly in my car ... Might as well act like an old bag now that I've become one.

When I got home I stripped our bed, washed everything and hung the two loads out on the line, where it dried by mid-afternoon. Then it was up to the church to record this week's offering. I suppose that was where the first extra time was taken up, because we encountered two very pleasant people in an open sports car who'd taken advantage of the relaxing of travel restrictions to visit a family grave and were outside the church as we were locking up again. Somehow we ended up chatting for ages, with them promising to look up one of our service videos on YouTube ...

Our afternoon walk was supposed to be a short one, in an attempt to make up time as Himself had the curry to cook for dinner. But it was so lovely, the sea so blue and alive with white horses, the sky a paler blue, everything so dry and vivid-looking, that we walked further than we'd meant along that shore road and turned halfway along the Ardyne beach road. (Photo) That was where the second chance conversation took place - we smiled to a very small boy with a very small bike, and then his even smaller sister, in her mother's arms at the time, also smiled charmingly, and before we knew it we were chatting away to their mother, who turned out to know fine who we were and had been in #2 son's class at school. It's a rather lovely thing living in a smallish community where you're known - all these friendly adults whom you last knew as teenagers and who assure you that you haven't changed a bit (when did we teach them to lie so charmingly?) and that they'd know you anywhere.

The last busyness of the day came when we got home and I had to remake the bed (that king-sized duvet!) all by myself while J cooked. I also made tentative arrangements for a family visit here next Saturday (please, weather - stay fair!) and then had half an hour to spare on writing a critique of a poem written by someone I only know online and slightly for whom it is part of an OU Creative Writing course. By the time I'd done this I was more hungry than I've felt in weeks and fell on that curry as if I'd not seen food in a month.

I had to do my Italian after dinner, after a glass of wine ... not the best idea. But I'm doing the easy opening lessons on gerunds, so I pinged through them with a will. Honour (and an unbroken run of 350 days) has been maintained for another day.

But I'll try to do it in the morning tomorrow ...