7November1997

7 November 1997
My dear folks,

There’s a dappled grey & yellow sky dulling over the chimney pots. Mave is lurking out in the stairwell, having ignored my whistled invitation to him to come upstairs. He likes his independence, old Mave. What he didn’t like was the performance on Guy Fawkes Day, a shrieking & banging that sounded like hell rising up. He retired under the bottom shelf of the display cabinet in the lounge & remained there, protected on five sides from his enemies. The sky above the motorway was lit up as I took myself to work. I had lots of time to admire the display because the traffic was going nowhere in a hurry. Took me 30 mins to reach the Beeb instead of the 9 mins I can manage on a good day. I reminded myself that this was the daily fate of millions of commuters & gave thanks for small mercies.

Chris Jones has come & gone. So have the phone calls from young women asking to speak to him. Not that these bothered me in any way; don’t get me wrong. I just wondered what it must be like to be so popular. After a busy week, he piled a heavy suitcase, a bulging backpack & a holdall into the boot of a mini-cab, waved goodbye & headed for Heathrow & Cape Town. He timed it well. The airport has been chaotic for the last two days with its “landing” runway blocked by the Virgin plane that failed to get its undercarriage down properly on Wednesday. We celebrated with a take-away Chinese dinner plus a couple of excellent bottles of wine that I had reason to regret the following morning. Never learn! Was interesting to catch up on his life. He’s earned the long break he now anticipates after managing a Guyanese road project in horrendous circumstances.

Jones has been planning her own return later this month. The planes returning from Faro are heavily booked & she doesn’t yet have a date. A couple has taken up winter residence in Casa 4 &, another couple is due to move into Casa 3. Jones will induct them into the mysteries of the Quinta before breathing a deep sigh of relief at the end of a heavy season. Of more immediate concern has been the violent storm that descended over southern Iberia on Wed, deluging communities further north with up to four inches of rain. You may have seen the pictures of the resulting devastation. The storms were forecast in sufficient time to allow Jones to tie down her saplings & take other precautions. Fortunately, we suffered no harm other than a few leaks - although the winds hurled spare deck chairs into the pool & upturned heavy flowerpots & tables.

I took myself off for a walk this p.m. to make the most of the thin sunshine. I found some streets up in upmarket St John’s Wood that I’ve not wandered along before. Closer to downmarket Kilburn, the kind of uproar that one associates with a busy playground heralded the approach of a school – except that the barrage of noise was emanating from the classrooms. I winced for the teachers. Back in Shirland Road, I took up the subject of education with Elaine, “my” hairdresser over the road at His and Hers. She & fellow snipper, Vee, admitted that uproar had characterised their own education which, they insisted, they’d both heartily enjoyed in spite of (possibly, because of) learning very little – by choice. Their teachers had done their damndest! On further reflection, Vee said she’d had steady work as a hairdresser ever since while some of her educated friends were on the dole. So it was probably a good thing she’d emerged ignorant! What can you say? To each his own.

I’m off now – in theory at least – until Tuesday! Wonderful thought. There’s a week’s worth of correspondence to catch up on & I’ve plans to see Bevan Jones tomorrow for a country walk, if the weather allows. I took a couple of hours earlier to put a whole lot of family photos on to the computer & turn them into a series of screen savers. They looked superb too but the computer eventually threw up its hands in despair & merely informs me now that it doesn’t have sufficient JPEG memory to display them. I’ve found a wonderful screensaver for my computer at work. It makes the images on screen melt & run down like rainwater, or it whips them around in a frenzied agitation.

My thoughts much with you
T