Day 126

It’s a year to the date that we moved from Stradbroke (the old village as I now call it) to Norwich. And, for some reason, I am running late this morning, although I got up earlier than usual because M has had to go into the office today.

Yesterday, I understood why I had given up coffee for 14 years. After working in the morning, I had to travel down to the old village to tie up some loose ends, and then back to Diss to pick up my new varifocals, and then back up here. A wearisome trip in that the traffic was awful both ways, that the bakeries in Diss had all just about sold out of something I wanted to have for lunch before starting the last part of the trip home, and that the car, even with the windows down, was very hot. But it was lovely to see some old friends again (not been down there since just before Christmas last year). So, when I got home just after 4pm, I gave in to the craving and had my second espresso of the day. And it did make me feel slightly woozy and hyper. And didn’t really set me up too well for my 5k walk that I had to do, as it was Long Walk Day (for me, anyway). So, I’ll be back to only having the one cup a day, I think, and I have had it already.

R commented on yesterday’s post how unusual it was for a man to have no agenda when writing a poem for an unknown woman in a restaurant in France. I will dig out that poem and put a picture of it up, on the original paper menu we used in that restaurant (I wrote two copies of it, even then being aware of posterity, I suppose, in my youthful vanity which still lasts now). I just hope, as I hope whenever I think of that woman, that it made her smile and that it somehow became a part of her life, and that she looks at it in her middle age now (I think she would be the same age as me) and remembers the day some odd-looking unshaven boy with too much hair and skinny jeans dropped an unsolicited piece of paper with a French poem on her table.

We must remember that our lives extend their tendrils into other lives, too. There is not really any such thing as splendid isolation, especially not nowadays. And in many ways that is a good thing. We grow, we grow. And not just older.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 82