I was sitting out reading when one of the estate’s cats sauntered into my eyeline (I heard the jingle of its collar bells first). She or he (who knows) stood for a short time staring at something (I couldn’t see it, perhaps it was the cicada-cum-grasshopper that keeps me company in the afternoons) in the undergrowth and then did a rather clumsy pounce, but caught nothing. She walked off, seemingly unperturbed. I saw her again later when I walked back to the flat. She was running then with a strange brown contraption attached to her hindquarters. Her owner, a girl in a black and white striped t-shirt was running after her. Come here, Heidi, she shouted. C’mon girl. I heard the owner continue to wheedle and call, but Heidi didn’t appear. We crossed paths up the little hill and I asked her what it was that was caught on the back of her legs. Flypaper, she said.
Lifting my eyes from my book I saw a plume of white smoke beyond the trees and in the valley. It took me a while to work out what it was. The toot toot came later. It was mesmeric to watch. Those lovely puffs of white clouds, leaving their slow trail in the air as the little steam train chuffed and huffed up the hill. The shouts from the children on the Col Field (as he calls it) having their sports day was equally pleasing. An unexpected pleasure. Aren’t they the best?
And the reading fills me with so many questions and yearnings.
I dreamt of my mother’s house. It had been sold but there were still things in it that were ours. I could see them. I was there looking at them while still with my sisters discussing them. There were coffee pots and coffee grinders. The old fashioned kind with a wee drawer underneath. I need one of those, I told my siblings. And there were foldable ladders or stairs – like the kind you get in old libraries, several of them with beautifully turned, beaded – I don’t know what you call them, uprights?
They’re renovating the paddling pool in the Prom. I told him of it at breakfast. Yes, he said, I read about it. They’re going to put in seats. Seats? I asked. Yes. So there won’t be a pool any longer. No, he said.
The house I liked on Queens Road has sold. I felt a pang when I saw the sign this morning.
