They’ve been playing repeats of The Reunion hosted by Sheila Macgregor on a Sunday Morning in place of Desert Island Discs, yesterday it was the one where she’d brought together the five ladies in waiting who’d assisted the Queen during her coronation. I’d heard it before but this time I noticed details that hadn’t sunk in previously. They were all of ‘blue blood’ naturally, though some were ‘plummier’ than others. I can’t think what age they’d be now, well into their eighties, I should think, or even nineties. But the girlishness was still there. But it was the recordings of people who either been there in the Mall our outside Westminster Abbey or Buckingham Palace or had watched it on one of the few available TV sets that amused me. Most especially the girl (now woman) who remembers that she had to wear her ‘Sunday Best’ to watch it on the box because her parents had told her: ‘you have to dress up for the Queen’. It was nice to hear it again.
It’s a beautiful morning, the sky is clear as day and the sea a stunning ultramarine. Seagulls float across the ether like white sailing boats. Lovely. I’ve begun my rice-fast and crave tea. What no tea? he said. No, just herb tea. I asked him to support me. He calls it a hair shirt but I see it more as a cleansing thing. An emptying thing. A simplifying thing.
I can hear a banging from downstairs. Is that him doing battle with the door? It was the last Butterflies last night. Sad. I shall miss it.
I want to write about my sewing. It seems an unimportant thing. And yet it is crucial to me. So crucial. It balances me. That simple act of making stitches in a pattern, calms me like nothing else. I get it. I get why it is used in therapy, it is therapeutic, it frees the mind but also holds it in check. Something is being done. Something is being moved forward. I love it’s rigour. I love its connotations, it’s history. The cuteness of some of its associations wrankle, but I do not need to buy into them. I see it very differently. I need to do it, you see. It eases my anxiety. I just wish I could work faster, there is much that I want to master. And I am mastering it. This current sampler is getting on much better that it was before. I am more dextrous, certainly. So get to it. A pot of herb tea, a nice cup and work.
Does it matter that I don’t know where I am going with it? That I just want the quiet it brings me?
