Day 125

I’ve started this any number of times. In my head. On the screen. Nothing feels right, and the weight of the words has been all wrong.

It’s taken me 30 minutes to write this so far.

Politics? War? Coffee?

Politics – Vote out as many Tory councillors as possible. No elections in my part of Norwich, so I feel very much on the periphery today. And ask myself how many of those who vote today will see sense, will realise that the last 12 years of Tory rule have been nothing short of genocide? When people are being starved by their government, being paid less in benefits than they have to spend just to exist. The ghosts of those dead will be haunting the polling booths today.

War – Men, women, children being murdered and murdering. There has never been any justification for war and/or expansionism. The world is destroying itself. Buttons are being pressed in one part of the world that send death to another part of the world. Merciless aggression. When I was being bullied as a child, I often asked myself why violence trumped everything else. It’s still like that. And I can see no end to it. Every time I hear a military engine overhead, I think it could be a missile.

Coffee – One of my best memories, which I may have written about before, is sitting in Avignon railway station in 1986 at about 6:30 one summer morning, the three friends I was travelling round Europe with off exploring somewhere, and me at a small round table with a croissant, a double espresso, and a Gauloise sans filtre. That, for me, was perfection all rolled into one single moment, all those different tastes mixing and mingling in my mouth, and the sun warm on me. And later that day I fell in love with a dark-haired woman in a wheelchair whose laugh had carried across the restaurant to me. I dropped a French poem for her onto her table when we left. Never spoke to her. How many possible junctions in those two moments? We never know.

There will be closures today.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 81