I have been without a car recently. My ancient Nissan Micro ground to a halt on the M 23 on a perishing cold afternoon and I was stuck on the hard shoulder for quite a while.. Not a good experience especially as I had dear brother P with me who is even older than I am. However we survived, thanks to mobile phones and the very kind A A man, and in spite of a worrying time being towed along the motorway, I got home safely. The car needed a new clutch at vast expense but it seems as right as rain again now.
P. had been staying for a few days and we had our usual poetic breakfasts and scrabble, which was lovely, and now life is back to my old routine, except that I have a new weekly activity: I am working at a hospice charity shop on Mondays. I am not very good with the till, having never used one before. I keep putting too many noughts so that it registers hundreds or thousands instead of just one pound and it took the supervisor ages to sort it out when cashing up at the end of the day but I have only worked there twice, and I hope I will improve. Apart from that I really love the job and they are a friendly lot. It is nice to start something new.
I saw a brilliant film at the Village Hall last week: Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance. It was so exciting, and really brought back memories of that Cold War time and the Berlin wall and everything. It was a true story too. With all the news being so worrying at the moment, it is quite comforting to remember how bleak it all seemed in the sixties and seventies and we have nevertheless survived.
This Friday, the day of the presidential inauguration in USA , there is a campaign to hang banners on all the bridges in U.K (maybe elsewhere?) saying `Build Bridges not Walls` which is a quotation from Martin Luther King. Some of my family are involved in this and I am very glad about that.
The combination of Trump and Brexit is a bit overwhelming at present.
I am off now to try and find some Seville oranges and do some marmalade making. That is the best way I know of cheering up these dark winter days.