13May1996

My dear folks,

Monday morning & a lovely one too. It’s Elgar this morning - Enigma Variations - with Holst’s planets waiting in the wings. Bea & Flea are doing their thing upstairs. Bea has caught a bit of a cold & is not pleased with herself. It might not be a bad thing to slow down a little for a bit, however, & it’s a glorious day to sit on the patio & soak up the spring. Mavis has been out there already, peering down into the gardens below for sight of his enemies. Earlier he sat a while atop the small ladder beside the open kitchen window, staring into space as if posing for a photo. Having posed, he descended to the foot of the ladder & took up station there, knowing full well that no bird was going to approach the nutbag while he was in silhouette.

I was sorry but not surprised to hear from Bea that Mavis was less than gracious in surrendering his spot on the couch to Morna the night before. He mounts a display of ferocious hissing that would have cowed a lesser spirit. Morna however insisted on visitor’s rights & removed him. As I explained to my aunt, the only way to do it is to tip him off without a word of explanation. This he accepts without resentment. There is no point in trying to negotiate with him. That only leads to trouble.

As you will be aware, I worked over the weekend, a much more satisfying experience than during the week when the bulletins team largely services the needs of the frenetic current affairs programme. Both days were busy, coping with the aftermath of the Indian elections, the plane crash in Florida & the rusting refugee ships off the coast of West Africa, crammed with human cargoes that nobody wants to know about. This is definitely a bad time to be a refugee, one of the worst in fact. I did a package on Saturday on the arrival in Britain of OJ Simpson - who’s to appear on a TV talk show & address the Oxford Union. Yesterday, I struggled to put together a piece on the Pope beatifying several goodly folk, including a cardinal who had given the Italian fascists a hard time, something - I pointed out - that was not universally true of his fellow churchmen. All the more reason then to beatify him.

My shift pattern has fitted in well with the needs & routine of my guests. Bea & Flea are off to Europe tomorrow, first to France by air & then on to Italy by train, in comfortable time for me to turn things around to be able to welcome Cathy & Anita in the evening. I have some time off with them as well before plunging back into a new series of nightshifts the very day they leave. It’s all most convenient & I’m grateful. I am a believer in thanking the gods for small blessings, possibly in the faint hope that they might be inclined to dispense large ones to appreciative customers. In my heart of hearts, I suspect the gods are mainly deaf or, like us, too caught up with daily concerns to spend much time weighing up petitions & indulgences. Still, the desire to placate the deities - if only for safety’s sake - is planted deep in our genes & we must accommodate it as best we can.

My dear Jones, thank you for your busy fax. You seem, at last, to have a sense of being on top of the garden. My thanks to John Vincent for the hard work he continues to put in. My day is relatively open. I plan to pop down to Boots at some point to try again to get one set of specs 100% right. They’re 99%, but that missing fraction bothers me. The plumber is to call at some point. And I plan to spend some time on the computer. That won’t surprise you.

Blessings, T