Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 May 2004 09:08:15
It was a lovely busy day yesterday. How do I ever find time to go to work, I wonder? First comes the treat of taking my son to school - I do love doing that. Then delivering and setting up a video player for an elderly lady from church so that her housegroup can watch a video together. She's a lady I've always felt drawn to in friendship although I've never really got to know her, so it was lovely afterwards for us to sit together and drink coffee and put the world to rights. I shall go up there again. Although I yearn for local friendships with people of a similar age to myself, in some ways age is totally irrelevent when it comes to friendship.
I then found myself caught between two formidable women... the one whose coffee I was drinking and the one I was planning to take out for coffee and had told I would be there fifteen minutes previously! Luckily they know each other and are friends themselves, so to the first I said "I'm sorry, I have to go, there'll be Hell to pay if I'm late picking up M, you know what she's like" and to the second I said "I'm sorry I'm late but there'd have been Hell to pay if I'd left M2 without having a coffee, you know what she's like" :D
Our trip out for coffee was to a wonderful manor house at Shorwell which had its gardens open to the public for a National Trust coffee morning. I'm in love with that garden. It was beautiful. Partly formal, but mostly cultivated woodland with a combination of beautiful "carefully random planted" shrubs and masses of wild flowers amongst soft twisting paths and a crystal-clear stream. And the colours, oh the colours. Blues and pinks and yellows and reds, tall succulent plants of a deep coppery red and bushes with yellow flowers so delicate that you could touch them without being able to feel them against your fingertips. And everywhere little benches and seats tucked away, a place to sit and imagine it was just you and God there. This being a private garden, it felt a little odd to be wandering round it and dreaming of living there - and of sending the children out to play in it and then not being able to call them in for tea! - but it was just the perfect way to spend the morning. Serendipity once again.
The afternoon was spent at aquafit again before racing home to meet the boys. As Tiddles had a major headache and all of us were coughing still, we decided to curl up together on the sofa and close our eyes and listen to a story tape, before I packed the two of them off to bed, smothered in Vick's Vapour Rub and full of hot honey and lemon.
Running over to deliver the clean dishes to Dad, I had a surprise as I went to tread on the third step. A hedgehog. Not curled up at all, just nose to nose with Charlie, each investigating the other. I got rid of the dishes quickly and returned to look more closely, but he'd gone. Not difficult to see where. I have a stretch of garden overgrown with pelargoniums and his movements were quite obvious as a rustle and shaking of the plants from below. We traced his route back and forth... and were somewhat taken aback when the movement suddenly moved towards us and... hop hop hop.... a frog leapt out! It would have been easy to believe in magic at that moment, especially as it was a dark night and the action was illuminated by the eerie spotlight glow of my security light from behind us. But no, the frog sat there quite happily at my feet, and the hedgehog continued his snuffling round under the pelargoniums until suddenly he decided it was time for bed and shot off across the lawn and under the shed.
News from a colleague doesn't bode well for my return to work, and yet tells me I'm as well out of there at the moment. The talk is all of redundancies and non-renewal of temporary contracts left, right and centre. Six of my helpers have been told they're no longer needed for September, though there's the chance that two may be interviewed and taken on again if the money appears from somewhere. I somehow feel quite resigned to whatever may happen at the moment. Perhaps God wants me elsewhere. Perhaps I learn to live more simply without the income and use my time in other ways. Perhaps I am needed there and all will fall into place for my return. Wait and see, Smudgie, wait and see.