A Valediction

Dear Reader,

I think I have told you before now that I absolutely hate mice.  They terrify me.  I am the sort of joke woman who jumps onto a chair and screams if I see one.  So I was interested to read about a WREN serving in the 1940/45 war.  She had been on duty all day and although exhausted, she met a boyfriend and they went dancing at an expensive club and restaurant.  And then it was hit by a bomb.

The part of the evening she remembers most was seeing mice literally jumping out of the walls where presumably they lived.  I didn't know mice lived in walls but I did read about a woman in the Tudor Age, who rode to London from Stratford, and stayed the night in an inn.  She couldn't get a wink of sleep as the mice in the walls were skittering about for hours keeping her awake.

Staying in old country inns from now on, if there are any open, I shall look with interest at the walls
of the bedroom I am appointed, and with some trepidation.

We all know, don't we, that we are never more than six feet from a rat .......

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May 20th, 1800 from Dorothy Wordsworth's journal.

'A fine mild rain.  After breakfast the sky cleared and before the clouds passed from the hills I went to Ambleside.  It was a sweet morning.  Everything green and overflowing with life, and the streams making a perpetual song, with thrushes and all little birds, not forgetting the stone-chats.'

 I think our countryside is 'green and overflowing with life' at the moment.  It certainly is here in the Cotswolds.

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A Valediction

To innocence
to childhood
to youth
to skipping about
to making daisy chains
to looking in the mirror
seeing someone pretty
to wearing gypsy clothes
feeling exotic in them
to flirting and being flirted with
to kissing someone new
drowning in that indescribable
feeling of lust and love
to smoking king-size cigarettes
to being passionate about something
daydreaming about a bright future
to changing the world
making poverty unknown
the poor rich.

But knowing now the truth
about old age being shite
hello to fudge and ice cold gins,
small pleasures and quieter things.

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With very best wishes, Patricia