Still Here

Wednesday 20th April 2011

Still here! I find I can’t go to bed without at least a sentence on the page. My husband is watching the news. The perfume of hyacinth and apple blossom is floating in through the open window and a big black fly is flinging itself against the ceiling with demented buzzing. I can see stars in the clean night sky but no moon yet. I know it’s there - yesterday my friend who walks her dogs at dawn every morning sent me a photo of it - a luminous round ball suspended over a church spire.

Late afternoon, hot and sultry as the Tropics - the wheel chair my father is sitting in has a life of it’s own, swerving uncontrollably into walls and doors. My sister and I take it in turns to push or pull him along the hospital corridor to the dermatology department warning him to keep his elbows well tucked in. We are seeing his favourite his skin doctor who is enormously tall and young and bright-eyed, who spent his honeymoon in Zambia and as far as my father is concerned is the miracle man who cured the itching rash on his back. Today he prescribes an ointment for the sore red nodules on my father’s arms that keep bleeding into his shirts.

I ask this delicious doctor to look at a small red lump on my shin. He peers at it through a torch gadget, his nose millimetres away from my not very recently shaved leg. He says,

‘It’s a BCC. You must come and have it cut out’.

That’s a skin cancer - not serious in that it doesn’t spread. No more sunbathing then. At least not without a thick white slick of Neal's Yard factor 30.

When it’s much cooler, the sun low in the sky, my husband and I walk in Mincing Lake Park, the red earth cracked and compacted beneath our feet. The evening is alive with birds singing. A magpie flutters up from a patch of meadowsweet, luminous as pale pink moons in the late sunlight. We talk a little but mostly I just let the warm air and the hazy view of the estuary filter through me.

And I think about what we’ll have for supper. Naan bread from the freezer, left over lentil and mushroom curry, lots of spring greens and the sweet sour tang of mango chutney. Familiar, comfort food. Like coming home. Like blogging.