Thursday 24th August - Falling in Love Again

 Yes, it's true... we are in love (I don't mean with each other, no, that hasn't come out right. We've been married for nearly 46 years and we are most definitely still in love...)

but a new love has come into our lives.

It is a bright red Fiat 500x petrol hybrid It is smooth, polite, deferential, willing, cooperative and incredibly well behaved. We have owned it for only ten hours, and our minds are made up.

It is also an automatic; I've never driven one before. I was seriously concerned as to how I would cope. I was also very apprehensive because since Lockdown in 2020 my driving journeys, mostly to visit friends locally, could be counted on my fingers, not including thumbs, so I am seriously out of practice.

Himself drove it the twenty miles from the dealers mostly in a silence of deep concentration but occasionally saying 'oh joy' or 'that was so much easier' every mile or so.

I have driven it round our local residential roads with some success so far, in that I didn't have any scrapes, bumps or near misses. Himself sat as copilot offering encouragement as necessary. I mostly concentrated on Turning Left, but have tried Turning Right and Reversing Out Of A Cul-de-Sac. It took a couple of circuits, but I am beginning to get the sequence of 'Mirror Signal Manoeuvre' in the right order, and to be able to interpret what I see in the mirrors rather than alternately staring straight ahead or looking wildly round in all directions without registering what I see. What impressed me most is that I only tried to use the clutch pedal once! ("Tuck your LEFT foot as far back and out of the way as you can").

If I can add half an hour's driving every day in ever increasing circles, and start introducing Traffic Lights and then Roundabouts I am hopeful that I'll get back into the swing of things. After all, in my previous existence before Covid I used to travel anything up to 100 miles a day from one end of the County to another between schools, filling in the time between driving with teaching samba drumming, djembe drumming, trumpet, clarinet, flute, recorder, ukulele, guitar and sometimes piano, cello or viola!

Luckily I did not teach ALL these instruments in the same day, just half a dozen on a busier day. Loading the car used to be a mix of memory test and puzzle solving. Do I miss those days? On the whole, no. The music, the fun, the companionship, the buzz, yes. The exhausting classroom management of difficult classes, and lugging instruments and resources in and out of schools, no.

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We didn't go out slugging last night. This morning I discovered one of my pak choi had been et. I have sprinkled coffee grounds around then next, and somehow I need to summon the energy to go slugging tonight. Ang asked what I did with the slugs and snails. I drop them into the council garden waste bin, whereupon they spend their days trying to climb up and out. The slugs sometimes manage to ooooooze their way to freedom. 

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Somehow half an hour's cross stitch got done this evening. Not the best time for me, but there wasn't that much left in this particular section and and just about managed to finish it without too much unpicking. I absolutely LOVE my Sarah Homfray variegated threads. You can feel the quality as you sew. The colours are beautiful with so many shades in each skein. Worth the money.