This Sunday

4th November 2012 Sunday

We were going to have breakfast in bed like we used to sometimes on a Sunday but we talk instead, eating into the morning hours - our new curtains, pale silken waterfalls, drawn against the sunlight coming and going outside. My husband says I’m angry and upset all the time and I blame him and the pussy cat for everything wrong in my life, he doubts my love. I can’t deny it. The truth lies between us like a peace offering.

I want to read my novel. He wants to walk. We meet up later in the kitchen for poached eggs on toast interrupted by taking the pussy cat up and down the stairs for a drink in the bath.

My nephew calls and we comiserate about pussy cats. They have two and one of them is spraying in the house, one of them is pulling out her fur. It feels less lonely knowing we aren’t the only ones living day by day with distressed creatures - not knowing what to do for the best....

We visit dear friends - celebrating the completion of their beautiful new kitchen....

Later my sister joins us and we sit in hard pews at the back of a Honiton church for a service remembering those who died this year -  a roll call of names - one of them my father. I think about my big sister on a plane to Beirut to visit her new grand-daugher and my brother in Fiji on a spiritual retreat and I remember our father more easily in them than here in this big draughty building on a cold wet Sunday night in a small Devon town.  Like my grandfather 'had the sun in him', I’m glad my father had Africa in him  -  the place I remember him best....