I love hearing her family stories. She is a wry one. She clearly loves them dearly but sees their ridiculousness too. Ah, we all have it. This time it was about her mother-in-law. She’s featured before in our discussions. In her eighties now she’s had lots of time to build up a stock of habits and mores. I hadn’t heard about the jigsaws before. I’d asked if they were going to stay with her when she took her to see Madame Butterfly at Swansea’s Theatre Royal. She said she was this time but the last few times they hadn’t been able to on account of the jigsaw. “Yes,” she said, “she had a 10,000 piece jigsaw of the New York skyline spread out on the spare bed, so we’ve been having to stay in a hotel.”
We saw him as we walked into town. He was standing looking at the list of buses due in the makeshift bus station. He had on a lime green jacket and he was standing there brushing his teeth, sans water and sans toothpaste. “Mad as a box of frogs,” he said, “and his eyes are a piercing blue.”
