Blood in the Snow

23rd November 2011 Wednesday

Brief moments from today....

I nearly fall asleep on the massage couch of our lovely pussy cat healer, wrapped in perfumes of burning scented oils and the light touch of her very soft hands on my clenched back.

My husband buys me a cup of hot chocolate in an olde worlde cafe. I send it back because it’s luke warm. It comes back piping hot with two marshmallows on the saucer - a sweet apology.

Late afternoon I walk with my father round the grounds of his temporary home. He’s wearing thin jogging bottoms and his coat and pushing a four wheeled trolley in front of him. His cheeks are spotted pink with the cold. It is the first time he has been outside for two weeks.

In the car park of B and Q where we are buying compost I make my husband wrong for criticising another driver. I want to stop doing that - judging him, and then me - even thinking it is like drinking poison.

I don’t feel like cooking tonight - find smoked haddock kedgeree in the freezer and bulk it out with lots of poached veggies - mushrooms and purple sprouting broccoli, green and red tomatoes and a tin of sweetcorn. All slathered with a tahini garlic dressing.

Watch David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet - but I don’t turn away soon enough in the bit where the wolf and the bison start fighting. I keep seeing the blood staining the snow and the white coat of the she wolf who won’t give up.

And later the haze of tear gas hanging over Tahrir square - I wonder how much more dying there will be before the desperate wolves bring down the military bison in Egypt.