Cutting The Mustard

20th January 2012 Friday

No good words tonight - I have run dry.

The wind is rattling my window, my husband is asleep and the bath has gone cold. I have been writing most of today - letters and emails - but my head is full of the stuff I haven’t done - like deciding what to pack for South Africa.

I find a blog I wrote last January about a visit to my father. When I ask how he is, he says,

‘I’m dogged by that things-left-undone-feeling.’

I re-assure him there is plenty of time.

‘But you know me,’ he says, ‘I don’t like to let the grass grow under my feet’.

Which is why I think he decided to leave. If you are a man of action, watching the grass grow doesn’t cut the mustard. And I know if he was here and he read that he would say,

‘What’s the origin of that expression?’

And he wouldn’t rest till one of us had looked it up on Google and printed it out and he’d told the next person who came to see him what ‘cutting the mustard’ means.

I will look it up tomorrow. And let you know.