2008 — 11 Feb: Monday — off to Hurn airport
Time is 01:07 and (again) it's quite chilly out there, with a fine crop of stars visible. Mike is off to Spain for three days, and I'm taking him to the airport down near Bournemouth. (Christa always got annoyed to see that Southampton claimed "Eastleigh" airport. And she's still on a "Bournemouth International" mailing list, but I will always think of it as Hurn; go figure.) Can you believe it? She died three months ago today! I think, after I've dropped Mike off, I'll carry on down as far as Poole Harbour and eat my lunch watching the ships just as we used to do together. Methinks there may be another spot of ash-scattering — a security camera at the BIC last week may have picked up some similar activity but no-one's arrested me yet.
More later, as it were.
Later!
But not much more to add, yet. It's 09:23 and I've just picked up an odd quote from Teilhard de Chardin on (of all places) the Terry Wogan radio show. Not quite what I generally expect but here goes (from shattered short term memory):
Man is not a human being on a spiritual journey. Man is a spiritual being on a human journey.
What the heck (in light of last night's viewing of the third Matrix film) do you suppose that means? Is our human existence just, as it were, a passing phase en route to somewhere else? One that tempers us like, say, Damascus steel is work hardened? Or is that just weird and wishful thinking?
On a more mundane plane of thought, I've also picked up a research task from Cathy1 involving emailing a technical support department about a reluctant external hard drive...
Back
It's now 15:53 and, having decanted Mike onto his Alicante flight, visited the gloriously sunny seaside, admired the flowers that are already coming into bloom down there, lunched, picked up a further trio of books in Borders, driven safely back and turned onto my drive, and just helped a PC Plod direct his squad car in the direction of the local exit chute for our glue-sniffing stink-wheeled joy riders, not to mention relaying the hard disk support line "answer"2 to Cathy, and replying satirically to my neighbour's note about getting his battered but trusty "Two Horses" — seen here reflected in our living room front window while Christa (just a month before she died, for goodness sake) was doing a spot of garden maintenance on 8th October — through its MOT...
... it's now way past time for a cuppa before I hit the re-supply trail once again. Tell me again how relaxing retirement is? I'm knackered!
Gosh. After hitting Waitrose, Asda and my local petrol shop, I see that the Yaris mileage has reached 5,020 miles. It had 14 when delivered, and Junior drove it one way to Southampton, and one way to the crematorium, so I reckon I'm trembling on the brink of 5,000 miles in just under four months. What on earth would Christa have made of that, I wonder? Oh well, time to stoke the fires of the inner man. Again. (Peking) duck and cover!
Wisdom from Sweden, via the Canaries
Christa's college chum Ute sends me items from time to time. She was as devastated as me by Christa's untimely death. She follows a Swedish newsletter(?) and translated parts into English and German. I liked the simple advice:
Take time to live. Time passes quickly, and will never return.
Of course, "never" is an awfully short word for an awfully long time. And at least one of my erudite readers has his own opinions on the nature of time. "Time is not some inherent characteristic of the universe itself, it is a characteristic of our experiencing the universe".
Heavens to Murgatroyd, Big Bro has just sent me the first-ever mildly risqué joke email I've ever had from him! Mind you, it's about bass fishing. Good Lord, I hope it isn't true... Thanks, Bro, it made me smile. I think, in return, the world should see that picture of you up in Alaska:
