A dream visitation

It's now a year since my beloved friend Louise Cooper died and last night, for the first time, I had a dream about her.

I was in her Cornish village and hopped on a bus just to go to the other end of the high street as I was carrying some awkward things; a black box, a book, a parcel, things I could easily drop as I couldn't get them in a properly balanced heap in my hands and I didn't have a bag to put them in.
I caught the bus but it didn't stop. I'd made the mistake of getting on a express bus that didn't stop for another four miles and the driver wouldn't let me off.

Stranded in the middle of nowhere, with my handful of objects, I looked forlornly round, hoping to find a passing taxi or another bus, but there was nothing. So I began trudging back towards the village. But as I got close, I noticed it had changed. Instead of low, rolling hills, there were high mountain peaks gloriously lit and outlined by the setting sun. There was a green mound with a huge buddha statue on it, grey-green with verdigris. Then the air shimmered golden and Louise was there, talking to me.

I wish I could remember all the details of our conversation, but I told her I loved her and missed her and I remember asking if it was true that when you passed over, you met all your dead loved ones again, and she said it was. I found myself looking down a long corridor, polished wood panels and floor, and a lady with short grey hair was walking towards me. She looked surprised to see me, as if I shouldn't be there, then Louise said she had to go, as she had a task to do. She said with a laugh that you were just as busy on the other side as you were on this one!

It was so wonderful to dream of her. I woke up feeling comforted. Don't know if I like the idea of having to work after death, though! Wonder if you get paid for it?

Green shoot....

I planted a knob end of ginger that had grown a white sprout. Wasn't sure which way up to put it so I stuck it in lengthways (which, I later discovered, is what you should do).

And now... is it a symbol of the green shoots of economic recovery, do you think?

Psychic again?

A few days ago, I had a dream in which a friend rang me and told me her mum had died. I mentioned it to a couple of people and said I hoped it wouldn't come true. Today, my friend rang and said her mum had had a fall and broken her femur and was in hospital. I got the cold shivers. I hope to God she'll be all right. Now tell me, is this just coincidence, or am I genuinely getting messages from out there somewhere? Whatever it is, I don't like it!

BigFest

It was Uxbridge's annual street festival today and while it would have been better if they had rerouted the buses, as they do for other events, so that visitors didn't have to dodge the traffic and they could have fitted in a lot more stalls, the bands were great. I was particularly taken with an acoustic trio who called themselves Rub a Dub and had a bubble machine on the platform they were standing on. Anyone who could play guitar in the open air on such a freezing day has to be applauded, and their songs were tuneful and catchy.

Here are a few of the odd sights I saw...

Is she sprinting to celebrate her heart transplant?

A balloon seller whose head has mysteriously morphed into a balloon

Reed... for sale?

Every damsel in distress needs one of these. Yum. Tasty! Wonder if he'd just popped in for more nails for his armour?

Trousers on the line

It took a man to show me that I'd been hanging out the washing wrongly all these years, and so had the generations before me.

Gran, Mum, then I, had always hung trousers up by the waistband. It seemed the right, sensible and visually correct thing to do. But the other day Mr Grumpy washed some clothes and I noticed, to my surprise, that he had pegged them out by the ankles. (Well, you can't say 'feet', can you? Trousers don't have feet. If they did, you'd encounter jeans and jeggings racing down the road to get away from whatever sweaty, smelly, overstretched fate awaited them!)

"Why are you doing that?" I asked him. "Look and learn," Mr G replied. "The weight of having the waistband at the bottom straightens the trousers so you probably won't need to iron them, you can hang other things between the legs and the wind can blow in and dry the items hanging behind them."

I had to admit it was a jolly good idea and I wondered why I hadn't thought of it myself, considering that I've been hanging washing out for... well, more decades than I care to remember. Why hadn't my mother, my gran, my great-gran even, thought of it? Why did it have to take a man to devise such a simple way of saving space and the chore of ironing? Or maybe that's the whole point! My ears still ring to the memory of Mr G's smug chortle. How men love to be right, especially when it comes to scoring points off women. Ha! I'll get my own back somehow. Watch this space.

Coincidence, or...?

I think I have been a little bit psychic lately.

It started when I was packing for my trip to the Lake District. Something told me to take an extra watch with me. It was an odd idea and not something I'd ever done before when travelling, but as my 'little voice', as I call it, had prompted me to do it, I did indeed pack another watch. Over the weekend, the watch I was wearing started slowing down and the day after my return it stopped completely. How did I sense that it needed a new battery? I had no idea of how long it was since I renewed the battery. It's not something I ever think about.

The next thing was the jacuzzi at the spa we visited last Saturday. It looked most inviting but that little voice told me not to get in. I defied it and climbed in and spent quite some time there, chatting to my sister and getting the powerful water jets playing on my aching shoulders. But no sooner had I got home than I felt a burning pain in the nether regions and by ten pm I couldn't even sit down and could hardly bear my knickers on! It was lucky that I brought some thrush cream with me, but it's taken me all week to get rid of the cystitis symptoms. Now, maybe it was the chemicals in the swimming pool that were responsible, but I can't help feeling that it was the jacuzzi's jets hitting me amidships, as it were.

The next day we were going out for an afternoon walk. As I put my boots on, that little voice told me to examine the welts. However, I only looked at the front of the boots, not the back. Had I examined the seam all round, I would perhaps have noticed that the rot had set in, the material had perished and the left heel was about to part company with the upper. And I don't just mean the sole, I mean the entire heel, the innards of which had literally perished and fallen apart.

In the past, I have disobeyed my little voice to my peril. Years ago, it told me not to put on a necklace I was especially fond of. 'Rubbish!' I admonished it and slung it around my neck. Hours later, I was just crossing the main road at a brisk pace so as to beat the oncoming traffic when there was a 'ping!' and the string of the necklace broke and all the beads rolled down onto the road. There was nothing I could do. Buses and cars were bearing down on me. I had to leave them as it was better that they got crushed under the wheels than myself!

What do you think it is, this premonitory instinct? Does anyone else experience it, too? If it's my guardian angel who wants to protect and help me, why the hell can't he or she predict the winning lottery numbers!

Le chat!

Here it is... looking a bit old, faded and cracked, comme moi!