Mostly Good.

I received an email this morning which contained a hint that the matter which has been bringing me so low lately might be about to improve. Early days, though. It’s a wait and see situation.

And then my morning walk treated me to a most unusual number of encounters: three young – or youngish – women, a splendid chestnut gelding, and two dogs which approached me to pay their respects without need of invitation. Needless to say I spent the rest of the walk in a state of disorientation. It seems the Lady Fu was in a particularly benevolent mood today. (She’s the one who occasionally treats me to random encounters with young women, dogs, and horses. I suspect she’s an intern in the pantheon of benevolent Chinese goddesses.)

This afternoon I received a telephone call from another young woman – a lady from Donegal who is one of the Senior Urology Nurses at the Royal Derby. She’d called to tell me that the CT scans I had a couple of weeks ago were ‘perfect’ (her term.) I like the word ‘perfect.’ So now it appears I will probably have to trudge through another winter, like it or not, but it’s still good to be told that my torso is perfect.

But then another encounter left me fairly convinced that a perceived connection I’ve been harbouring for many a long year has been unilaterally dismissed. I bear no ill will. Life moves on. (But it did hurt just a little.)

And what about the strange cat which loomed out of the heavy growth in the glooming garden at twilight yesterday? It was a most handsome creature – mostly white with a few tortoiseshell patches. It stood and stared at me for a few seconds, and then did what cats always do: turned tail and ran away at high speed. It seems that dogs and horses like me but cats don’t. I have no idea why.

My writing style is lacking fluidity lately. That’s a shame because I’m the sort who considers style to be at least as important as content, maybe even more so. Robert Louis Stevenson showed me that thirty years ago. Not giving up yet.