A good day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

As I walked through the woods and past the hill this morning, in the dazzling September sun, I listened to Van Morrison, and wrote the blog in my head. Oh goodness. it was a dilly. It had everything. It really was dancing girls and pom-poms, which I am always promising you, and which never quite materialise.

Now, as the sun lingers and sets, gilding the dry stone wall and dappling the beeches outside my window, I cannot recollect one word of it.

Bloody lucky you are such forgiving readers, as well as Dear.

In the end, it was a flat-out work day. The Co-writer called, for a massive editing conference. Oh yes, I had said; it will only take a couple of hours. I was blithe and impatient. On, on, yell the voices in my head. In the end, we did three hours of hard graft and thought and discussion, and we are not even one third of the way through.

No matter. This is the nature of the thing. I ended up galvanised, and more hopeful than I have been since I can remember. The Co-Writer said some wise and understanding and kind things. She surprised me, a little. I am used to being very slightly misunderstood. It is not so much in a dramatic, I am so enigmatical and mysterious that no human may ever plumb the mazy depths of my convoluted psyche way. It is more that I make mildly odd choices, which most of my cohort have not. So sometimes there is a very slight distance between what is assumed, and what is.

I think we wrote something in Backwards about how what women really want is to be got. (Almost certainly men too.) When someone really gets it, it is not only a comfort, but also a great compliment, because they have taken the time to observe and take in the wanderings of your inexplicable mind. This morning, I felt got. That is a very short, and not particularly elegant sentence, but it is a potent one.

Then I wrote 1097 words; did some reading; did some thinking; and completely forgot to eat my lunch. This is not healthy, but it is the sign of a good work day. I had to rush into the village at five o’clock and buy a lovely Aberdeen Angus steak for strength, which I ate bloody, with garlic and parsley, and some watercress on the side, just to make sure that I really did feel like Popeye afterwards.

Then the Pigeon and I went outside to look at the evening light and smell the flowers.

I hardly dare write this because of tempting fate. Because it may not be true tomorrow. Because I am not so daffily sanguine to believe that everything changes just because thinking makes it so. But I woke early today with a sense of shift, a return of determination and optimism, a hope for better things. It may not last. Not everything in the garden may remain lovely. But it can be marked: today was a Good Day.

 

Some quick pictures now, of this evening’s garden:

The Pigeon was looking particularly majestic in the light. Sometimes when I take her picture I just shoot away, fast as I can, so that I occasionally catch her like this, all blurry and blinky:

Then we settle down and do some serious posing and composition, so we get the serene profile:

The elder stateswoman face, as if she is a cross between Dame Mary Warnock and Baroness Shirley Williams:

(She really should be in the House of Lords, with a face like that.)

And the I-suspect-there-is-a-rabbit-in-that-bush look:

Hill is especially elegant today, in the astonishing light: