Waving from England

 How are you doing, darlings?

I confess I have nothing in particular to say — no exciting things happening where I am, and the world news is the usual sort that makes you want to go out and shoot yourself, so maybe best ignored.

Having no insights or reflections to impart, you will just have to see this as a letter from your English aunt.

Right now in our house, one of us is just up the stairs from my room, in the attic, playing jigs and reels on the violin, fast and with determination. Meanwhile, two doors along, another of us is working slowly through a new and unfamiliar piece of music on the French horn. Oh. She's moved on to the flute. Wait — they both have. I didn't even know Hebe had a flute. In the room next door to me, Tony is working silently and persistently on the endless editing and correspondence that dominates his life. He's just taken on editing the newsletter for our local expression of the Green Party. Tomorrow he's going to a protest about our water company that cuts corners and dumps raw sewage in the sea.

It took us a while to get back into anything that could be called a "habit" of venturing forth after so many months locked down, but once I noticed that Tony had started going out to lunch and coffee with writers and politicians and dignitaries of all kinds, but not with me, I staged my own protest and we are back on with the coffee and lunch dates we long ago used to enjoy.

So this morning we went on the bus to Hastings town centre where there's a newish coffee house called Hanushka, the interior walls lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves housing donated books you can borrow or buy or add your own. What a wonderful idea!  

Naturally we couldn't come home without a book, so after we'd finished our hot chocolate topped with a towering mountain of whipped cream and marshmallows (yes, it will kill us, but we both do it so we'll weigh the same and die together) we selected something we couldn't possibly leave behind — in Tony's case a novel by Wilkie Collins with a magnificent cover of stern Indians and the Buddha —

and for me, this

and this.

But first I must put my foot on the accelerator and finish off this novel.

It is good, but the author gets bogged down in quips and cleverness rather to the detriment of narrative depth. Enjoyable, but possibly not memorable. I may even put it aside in favour of one of the others, though I think I will forget who all the characters are if I do that.

Before I do any of that, though, I'm going downstairs to get myself a cup of tea . . .

Et voilà!

I take (unhomogenised, organic, whole) milk in tea, but it comes in one-litre flagons, which take me several days to use up, such that it is perilously near cheesy before I reach the end. In consequence, I have to buy (oh, such a shame) dear little bottles of very delicious iced café latte from Marks & Spencer, so I have something to decant my milk into and then I can freeze it. You can immediately grasp the necessity, I'm sure. I defrost one very day.

Blessings on your day. May you be contented, may you be peaceful, may you carry around some quietness inside you, as George Fox recommended us to do.