On Sunday I suddenly realise I have time now so I walk in the University Parks. It's the first time for months. I haven't walked anywhere for months. It's a beautiful golden Indian summer day. Late September sunshine - it always reminds me of my first job in London, after I left school, as a volunteer teaching assistant walking to the tube station at Kings Cross in a brown crimpline mini skirt....and my first term at University in Cardiff walking down the hill to my first lecture in new red suede shoes..
Pennsylvania hill, a few minutes from our house, on the way back from the park.
I haven't got used to this new freedom yet...my days still full of Robin and arrangements and worry...but my mornings, my evenings all mine. I'm afraid I may get drunk on this little liberty and go off the rails a bit - watch random TV, get fat on slabs of chocolate and bread and honey and stay up all night reading a novel.
Hasn't happened so far - as if I've forgotten how to let go....or rather just lost the taste for it.
All morning while the cleaner hoovers and dusts and reclaims the house for me, I work on the computer and on the phone, and try and cancel a holiday I booked for us back in March when I thought we could still travel. I'm waiting for calls back from the GP, the speech and language therapist, the hospice care nurse and the neurologist's secretary but suddenly it's time to go and visit Robin and I can't face eating lunch so I drink a green smoothie and take the other two to him in a cool bag.
I'm feeling encouraged about him as he had a good visit and drive this morning with lovely P.A. She insisted he drink something and he ate flapjacks and chocolates that she had in the car. He's waiting for me out side the home, sitting in the wheelchair, in the sunshine, with one of his nice carers.
We drive out to Dawlish and I stop every now and again to take photos but really it's a secret motive to get him to drink a few more sips of the green smoothie I whizzed up for him this morning. He shakes his head but drinks it anyway.
When I ask him how he is, he smiles his crooked smile and says,
Fine, not too bad.
So I don't mind so much about the teeth grinding and I turn up the volume of Handel's Water Music as loud as he wants.
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