Connections and Goodbyes.

I finally did it yesterday; I finally said goodbye to my old but broken Spanish guitar which has been with me all my adult life. It now lies forlorn but not forgotten in a large skip marked ‘non-recyclable waste’ in Ashbourne’s municipal tip. And it has company in the form of my old woollen jacket which kept a little of the cold out through many a stark winter’s night in my office. (That was in the days when I couldn’t afford supplementary heating in here, and I suspect they might be about to come again.)

When you live alone and rarely speak to anybody, it’s easy to invest near-anthropomorphic qualities in inanimate things. Or maybe it isn’t quite that simple. Maybe something of our personal energy does become infused into things we’ve been close to, and so the sense of saying a sad goodbye to them isn’t quite as silly as it might seem.

I saw Gimli in Ashbourne again, trundling along with his trusty staff as usual. He has no hair now, and appearances would suggest that it must have favoured warmer climes and migrated south to his voluminous grey beard.

Ashbourne, and Sainsbury’s in particular, was unusually busy for a Wednesday, and the smaller shopping trolleys which I use are becoming scarcer and scarcer. I had to wait for the trolley man to bring in what few were standing in the storage bays before I could do my shopping. I wonder how many more ways the world will find to change in these increasingly challenging times. And will I say the final big goodbye before they become intolerable?