* * *
Talking about beautiful young things, I’m often struck by
the quality of the girls sharing the lunch boxes of the lads from Thomas
Alleyne’s High School in Uttoxeter, or Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in
Ashbourne (both founded in the Tudor period, I believe.) They weren’t like that
in my day. There wasn’t a single girl in my secondary school I would have
wanted to go out with (or even share my lunch box with if I’d had one, which I
didn’t.) The only two girlfriends I had prior to the age of seventeen both came
from the church youth group. Yes, I belonged to a church youth group, but only
up to the age of fourteen. At fifteen I became a regular pub crawler and stood
under lamp posts singing ‘I’m a poor little lamb who has lost his way, bah… bah…
bah…’ Oh, no; that was my granddad, or so I’m told. I only met him about twice,
and nobody even told me when he died. In fact, he might still be alive for all
I know, but I doubt it.
* * *
It was very wet yesterday, and the lane turned into a river
again. I went out at dusk to clear some of the grids so that the water could
run off, and do you know what? There I was standing in the torrent, getting
well soaked and with fingers going numb from the cold, shovelling out spades
full of soil and leaf mould, when a car came past. He didn’t cut his speed one
bit – just drove past as though I wasn’t there and showered me with dirty
water. Some people have an odd way of expressing gratitude, don’t they?
* * *
The next jotting was going to be about how difficult it is
to ‘just be yourself’ since it’s so difficult to know who ‘yourself’ is, but by
the time I’d fetched a piece of cheese to munch, I couldn’t be bothered. At
least I have YouTube for later.
* * *
My office is cold tonight. In between typing, I’m holding a
hot cup of tea to my lips in order to warm my nose. It’s steaming up my reading
glasses. I hate winter.
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