2008 — 27 September: Saturday
Off to nearly as misty a start today as it was yesterday in Rushden. It's just gone 08:03 and I shall start stuffing the next crockpot to the tunes played by Brian Matthew. Then I can think of what's next on my ever-present "to do" list, I suppose. Ho hum.
Right! It's 09:34, and I've turned my attention to my long-delayed cuppa while Monsieur le Crockpot starts his journey to sizzling satisfaction. Having admired my Aunt Ivy's garden yesterday I've also been looking at mine again. What's now a bog garden began life as an excavated sandpit in the late 1980s. Christa and Peter dug it out, lined it with old bits of carpet and some tough waterproof liner, and initially turned it into what we hoped would become a frog-filled watery paradise. Here's a picture from the late stages of that bit of work:
Christa and Peter working on the pond, circa 1987
Mortal thoughts... dept.
The funeral service for my aunt Peg on Thursday went very well, I thought. Death was, in her case, a blessed relief. I also found it very helpful to talk with my aunt, too, comparing notes (as it were) with her own loss (of my uncle) in March 2004. Mind you, every time an uncle or aunt flutters, as it were, to the ground so one's own mortality advances a step nearer. Given that I still feel inside as if I were in my late teens (despite all visible physical — and mental — evidence to the contrary) it's all very odd.
A random thought: I honestly don't know my current "legal" status. That is, whether I'm still technically married. I assume marriage dissolves with death (the old "till death us do part" bit) though I still feel married! Today is the last day of our 33rd year. This time last year we were just coming to the end of Christa's radiation doses, which did wonders in diminishing her pain for her final few weeks, but nonetheless probably hastened her death. What an impossibly horrible set of equations to solve.
I shall celebrate our anniversary with a walk in the countryside. Somehow, the death of aunt Peg seems to have placed Christa's death in a slightly more distant perspective. Not that distance lends much enchantment to that view. It's been belatedly occurring to me that I have been extraordinarily naive through what I like to think of as my adult life; it never really dawned on me (emotionally) that Christa and I would ever be parted (except by death) and I always blithely assumed that that would be a simultaneous event given the gap in our ages.
I'm delighted to note that the generally lower level of stress hormones recently as I slowly acclimatise to this strange new modus vivendi has been doing wonders for my memory. And as domestic survival duties become more nearly routine, so I have both more time and a growing inclination to look out from my slough of despond. Pain does fade, as I know perfectly well. (Mind you, I'm now staring an imminent root canal filling in the mouth, as it were; these are not generally very nice! And there's my new car's first annual service; another untried experience for me.)
Incoming...
I mentioned, a week ago, one or two items in the orders pipeline. Mr Postie was kept busy in my absence:
A curious little disclaimer in the tiny print. Could it be that ITV failed to ask Penguin for permission to show a copy of their edition of the book? The first episode transmitted clearly showed that edition, whereas the cover artwork of this new DVD does not.
Ann Leslie is an entertaining anecdotalist — I heard her on a recent podcast from Woman's Hour. "Regrets" seems to be another stab at documenting the life of Jane Austen (like last year's Becoming Jane which was one of the last films Christa and I were able to enjoy together). I missed the final episode of "Lost" (preferring to chat to my hostess — the aunt I was staying with in Rushden) but had already decided to buy the DVD. It will be tonight's viewing, I very much suspect.
As for these four... well I was so annoyed that my recording of The Candidate got truncated because the transmission started late that I bought my own copy. The fact that the points it makes about political campaigning and spin-doctoring are even more relevant today than in 1972 is just extra gravy. I've been listening in awe to the late (great) Ian Richardson reading Brian Sibley's adaptation of the CS Lewis memoir but had never seen the Richard Attenborough film. My interest in Alice was sparked by Mike playing me the wonderful 18-minute song "Alice's Restaurant Masacree" which I hadn't heard for a very long time. And Desert Hearts is just a wonderful film based on Jane Rule's novel; the fact that the two leads are so easy on my eyes doesn't hurt. This is a 20th anniversary re-issue with Donna Deitch doing a fresh commentary and interviews.
Well-primed
It's possible (it seems) that the number (243,112,609 - 1) is a Mersenne prime. (Source.) Crikey. And since Junior rang to tell me that, on his next visit, he'll be returning the server PC that I bought for him (now that he's so rich he can afford quad-core toys) I will be interested to assess the performance of the latest Linux distros.
Christa always liked the actor Paul Newman, who's died at 83. I think one of his best films was Nobody's Fool, based on the 1993 novel by Richard Russo.