The kindness of friends

I'm just in from choir, and we worked hard tonight, so I mustn't ramble ...It was in fact the only time I went over the door today. The wind was still gusting from the NW and colder than I'd expected, but the main factor I think was my poetry class in the morning after the rigours of yesterday. I chose to do Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings today - that warm, heavy Whitsun train journey giving a complete contrast to today, and the condescending description of the wedding parties weighing against the superb mastery of the poet over his form. I remembered lectures in Ordinary English at Glasgow Uni on the words "to see the object as in itself it really is" - in other words, to concentrate on the art without allowing one's knowledge of the artist to affect one's response. It's a big poem, and I was worn out when I came back down from the high of teaching.

I think the other factor in the collapse of will in the early afternoon was a simpler one: I was hungry. Avid followers of this journal will remember I tend to eat at a strange mid-afternoon dinner on choir days, and it struck me suddenly that the flu-like exhaustion I was feeling was probably low blood sugar or whatever simple starvation brings on. Anyway, I felt better after a big bowl of pasta.

I'm blipping two images that make me smile at the thought of good friends with kind ideas. The flowers are a close-up of the ones my dinner guests brought last week: I never realised the wee purple jobs sprouted tiny white flowers. And the bag came as a total surprise from my friend Lesley, who picks me up for Pilates these days. We've known each other since she arrived in Dunoon Grammar School as a new teacher, just starting out, at the same time as I resumed my full-time teaching career after 8 years of child-raising and 21⁄2 years of part-time supernumerary work. We've sung together for much of that time as well. Now that she's retired, she's taken up, inter alia, making bags - and this is what she made for me. The material was chosen, she said, to represent all the people I've taught. I was quite overcome. 

I make nothing, really - I know many blip friends do, and I realise that I've even forgotten how to sew seams decently. But I have made some jolly good friends ...