MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE HOMESTEAD…
Whilst at home & abroad the unthinkable gets thought, the unspeakable gets spoken & the undoable gets done, our little hearthside lives putter on much as ever.
# Reuben has been ill. On Tuesday gastro-enteritis suddenly struck & - as Monty Python once said so graphically of Australian wines – it opened the sluices at both ends. In 19 months it’s been his first disabling illness & it was grim to watch him so distressed & confused. In the moments when the immediate discomfort ebbed he would try to resume his usual routines. Then another wave of nausea would strike & the anguish would return.
Such absolute vulnerability. With my mother on the edge of her 90th birthday, stable but infirm in a nursing home near here &, at the other end of the age spectrum, Reuben staring up big-eyed from his bed of pain, one has an acute perception of how fragile we are.
But today Reuben was much brighter & his ongoing project of opening & then slamming every negotiable door in the house was resumed. A notable bonus of his temporary indisposition has been more or less unbroken sleep & so we’ve managed to snatch a glorious 7 hours instead of the usual aggregate of about 5.
# Our daughter is due on June 10th. Emma is constantly uncomfortable now. Sciatica strikes without warning & the baby moves restlessly day & night. All things being equal, it will be a home birth. For all the dedication & skill of the midwives, an NHS hospital under pressure is not a happy environment for confinement. And afterwards life will clatter over the points & onto yet another railway line.
# At school the tidal deliveries of coursework to be marked continue. I bring them in, rummage through the fractured syntax & revolutionary spelling & send them back on the next flood. In 10 days my 16, 17 & 18+ students are all assessed on their self-written plays & scripted extracts. For a couple of days there will be that uniquely harrowing but ultimately intoxicating exposure to ‘the roar of the greasepaint & the smell of the crowds’ & then the bulk of my year’s work will be over.
And just outside the confines of this real world, the great pantomime will carry on as if none of these little existential sequences & processes were of the slightest significance or value…
#
As an erstwhile cat-owner, this made me laugh.
11:20:56 PM 
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