Choices

Today we would normally have been packing up ready to go to our timeshare property in the Lake District for our annual three week stay, which we have done for many years now. Sadly it’s not possible for us to go this year, but the upside of our enforced stay at home is that we shall be able to see the spring flowers in our garden coming into bloom, which we normally miss! So there’s always a silver lining …

I’m looking forward to making the most of the extra time at my disposal by getting lots of jobs done in these three weeks. Today I have done two more dressmaking alteration jobs – I’ve shortened the sleeves on a nightie from ¾ to short sleeves, which looks so much better, and I’ve taken up a pair of trousers that I’ve had some time, which means I bought them before I started to shrink in height. My craft room now looks as though a tornado has blown through it – I’m a messy worker in there, although tidy in all other aspects of my life!

This evening I’m going to transcribe some more of the 50 year old letters that I found a few days ago and scanned for posterity. And that’s the reason I’ve chosen to call this journal entry "Choices". Since reading through them with my husband when we first found them, we have been thinking a lot about the impact that a single choice can have on our lives. Fifty two years ago, when I was 21, I abandoned at the last minute a planned theatre visit with a group of friends from my Private Secretary’s Diploma evening class, and instead went to a party with a work colleague to make up a foursome with her, her boyfriend and a friend of his, who was unattached at the time. Those letters were written to me two years later by that same young man who by now was my husband! Co-incidentally I have just finished reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig which also discusses the subject of the choices we make in life, and which resonated with me as I read it.

On our walk this morning I took a photo of a beautiful hedge of Choisya ternata (Mexican Orange Blossom) and was intending to use that because of the pun on the word choices. But the photo didn’t turn out that well so I have replaced it with a Clematis ‘Montana’ which grows beside our front door.