Autumn Acer beauty at Castle Drogo this afternoon.
I'm fascinated by these fruits -they look exactly like miniature apples,
but grow like cherries - a mystery.
In the queue in the cafe at Castle Drogo Robin leans across the man behind him and snaffles a crumb of pastry from the last lonely slice of Bakewell tart on a plate on the counter.
When we started to queue I'd said, like I always do,
Don't touch anything or pick up anything and smell it or eat anything till we've bought it.
I'm not going to, he says.
So then I do my telling off/glaring thing. I let my myself be really pissed off for a while. Then I notice how pointless it is, how it's me that's miserable...ruining my own lunch. So I just talk about the last time we came here and I don't say anything about the four sachets of sugar he pours into his coffee. I lean across the table and cut up the tough skin of his baked potato as his right hand is even weaker and more useless since he fell on it, tripped up the steps when we were walking on the Cobb in Lyme Regis on Sunday.
I want to feel compassion for his arm and his hand - none of it his fault - but just feel annoyed by how handicapped he is...he never complains about it and is really good at doing the exercises to strengthen it. So I've decided just to go on feeling annoyed till I can access a kinder, bigger part of myself. And meanwhile I'm trying to have some compassion for the furious 5 year old inside me, feeling abandoned, stamping my foot about how it isn't fair.... I have to do it all now .....all by myself.
Later Robin waits patiently for me in the weak sunshine while I take endless photos, wandering round the formal gardens surrounding the castle. And he doesn't even eat any of the herbaceous borders.....or even a miniature apple/cherry. For which I'm very grateful. And I tell him so.
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