The prefecture at St. Brieuc continues to issue draught warnings and we are only allowed to water the garden after 8pm. The pond levels are dropping, and I may have to use the big pump again soon.
This morning started with a dream in which Felix the wild stray cat was lying on the bitumen near the gateway in the South and by the post box.
Traditionally he lies there to soak up the late afternoon heat and to wait for me to come feed him. When I come bearing a bowl, he goes out of the gate circles round through the hole in the Yew hedge and waits watching from under a bush for me to put his bowl down. The moment my back is turned, and I am heading off, he sneaks out of the bush to tuck in. He lets me get within about four metres of him now.
In the dream as I approached, he lay motionless. I made some welcoming noises and knelt down by his side. He allowed me to stroke him for a while. After a while two small black and white kittens, like Felix, came out from under the yew hedge at the other side of the gate and started to play with me climbing all over my back and shoulders. Felix lay still watching. After a while a miniature long maned horse appeared through the gate. The horse was about 40cm at the shoulder and using its head, it beckoned me to follow it. This I did and he led me up a hill to a piece of pasture which was roped off. In that pasture was a huge, thoroughbred white stallion in magnificent condition. The dream ended and I knew that a part of the dream was pointing at the gateway in the South, the place of dreams and the gateway to the nagal’s world. Something is afoot in the unknown.
We never close the gates now, because the gate motor, made in South Africa, has given up the ghost due to old age. Because of this and the pond we have become something of a watering hole of late. The variety of droppings down by the pond has increased and there are several clear runs in the long grass down to the water.
The weather is confusing some of the plants. The beech has started to drop its leaves early and the magnolia is starting to sport purple flowers. This is odd behaviour for early August…
Physical plane reality remains as it currently is. After making the wife a hot chocolate and fetching her breakfast, I have put some washing on and then vacuum cleaned the ground floor ~100 square metres. The washing is now out on the line, and I have checked for new mole sign. There is none so I will lift the 8 mole traps later on. In a while I will do lunch for us both and fill the dishwasher.
So as to mitigate the stir crazy factor we went yesterday to Pontrieux for a walk along the brackish river. The wife has only seen home and hospital since she bust her foot. So there we were, a man with bilateral osteoarthritis in his hips, pushing a chemotherapy patient with not very much hair and a plaster cast in a wheelchair along a path by some nice boats. This picture from Google maps looks to be an autumn one. {Water} There is an X-ray and orthopaedic appointment on Wednesday.
We had a brief conversation the other day. When I am alone it looks like it will be possible for me to move to South Africa and employ someone to look after me and clean the house etc..
It was in the Southern hemisphere that I first learned about impermanence. At the age of five and in possession of a nascent Bristle accent I was transported from a green and pleasant land into the harsh dry red semi-desert of Mount Isa. I moved from red squirrels on the Bristol Downs to goannas in the creek. I never saw my friends from Bristol again. I learned to chameleon and in a short while I was speaking Queensland Strine to fit in. When I was nine, I was taken out of the red and into the bush of Kabwe. Where for a couple of months I attended a convent school. Boys were not allowed after the age of ten. I sat next to Agnes who was fourteen, a woman really. She smelled of kapenta {a kind of freshwater sardine introduced to aid the protein level of the diet} and I helped her with her homework. Then they shipped me off to boarding school in Gloucestershire. I would fly back unaccompanied for school holidays. I learned to speak posh, no room for Aussies or Afrikaners in that school. Then just after I won the science scholarship to the senior school my parents came back to the UK to avoid the birth pangs and violence associated with the nascence of Zimbabwe. Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines were no longer paying my school fees. I was thrust for a couple of months into a huge comprehensive school. From an all-boys preparatory school to a 1.5k student comprehensive at 13. I was the only boy in the top French set with 26 girls. That was traumatising. I never saw or spoke to any of my classmates from boarding school, or Zambia again. Then I went to my seventh and final school in north Kent, where once again I picked up the local accent.
So, I know that things are impermanent, and I know in some cases it is impossible to go back. I know how never to return.
Traou an Dour 