The day so far

This morning I woke up at 5.50 after 8 hours sleep and checked the weather forecast and thought - Yes! Bike ride this morning!

Then this is what happened:

I did Wordle and Quordle and Sequence Quordle;

read the awful news, specifically this morning about Saudis shooting unarmed women and children refugees on the border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia (and YET our PM is hosting the Saudi prince who also ordered the killing of the journalist Khashoggi);

had breakfast in bed of Dave's homemade oatcakes and my homemade lemon curd;

wrote my to do list for this week;

answered yesterday's set question in my 5 year diary "What are you avoiding?" Answer: "Bad news";

read from my new anthology Being Human, which I bought in London on my day trip last week. I have the other two books in the trilogy - Staying Alive and Being Alive, but oh I think this is the best. It blows me away every time I open it and read. There is a lot of tough and moving stuff in there but here is something other:

then I got up and made a flask of coffee for my bike ride stop, and got my bike out of the shed, and coming back inside met Dave who was brandishing some paperwork he wanted me to look at and I sat on the bottom of the stairs to read it and mentally file it,  and then looked at the photo of the grandchildren taken ten years ago that's hanging in the hall and said "Aren't children wonderful?" and Dave said "Yes, and then they grow up and become people." (He was talking in general terms, and NOT about our own three fabulous offspring.) We had a tussle of words while his bleak view of life got an airing and then I sighed. I felt too weak and tired to set off on the bike.

That's what being me is like.

So I came up to write to you. I had wanted anyway to tell you about the poetry book and also show you these photos of weird chairs in the RA exhibition last week:

Photo by Het

Photo by Het

I had two sleepless nights last week and spent Saturday lying on the sofa reading my poetry book, as I was too tired to do anything else. Then I slept well and went to Meeting, which cheered me up enormously. It was food for the soul. 

I wanted to ask you whether on sleepless nights you too lie in bed worrying about the state of the world and our country in particular and about your family, and then about the world again and climate crisis, and then about the possibility that benighted Americans (of which there are millions) might vote Trump in again, and about the fate of all of our grandchildren...

But now it's Monday and having sat down for half an hour and written to you I feel strong enough to go out into this sunny day on my amazing new bike. 

And as the woman used to say at the end of the Morecambe and Wise Show "Good night, and I love you all!"