I must not moan x 100

On Big Brother, it’s probably about Day 3,496…I don’t watch it. Nothing can top Paddy Doherty in my books. On my father’s blog, it’s Day 18 of the Indian Summer which infers that he lives in Calcutta and not the reality of somewhere south of Leicester. In the life of one with a plastered leg, it’s Day 3 and the highlight of being trapped is fast becoming Bargain Hunt. This comes after the early morning call to continue the saga, via telephone, of avoiding paying council tax for the duration of being ‘disabled’

Today, I learned that County Hall has demanded proof of a number of uninteresting circumstances, none of which can be elaborated upon until I reveal my ethnic origin, marital status and current income. No, I don’t currently have an income, hence the application. Having met these requisites, I told the pleasant lady on the phone that I hadn’t received the said demand for ‘proof’. She agreed. They haven’t sent a letter. Well, is it to be done by telepathy? Perhaps you could just send us some money on the off chance was the reply. On the off chance of what? That I’ve got some money? And that you might empty my wheelie bin more than once in a Preston Guild?

Good God: three days in and I sound more like my father than he does!

While I’m hopping my irritable way to the loo, I remember Ivy. I visited Ivy, in her tiny flat for five years. It began as a piece of research but when you start with elderly, lonely people there’s no easy escape. She taught me a lot about the social history of Poole and was entirely devoid of self-pity with regard to the deal life had handed her. When they phoned to say she’d died, aged 93, she’d spent interminable years in a wheelchair, trapped in a room without a view. The light filtering over the net curtains told her what sort of day it might be.

Ivy’s grandmother came to Poole as part of that strange, forgotten exchange with Newfoundland. Stories of Ivy’s childhood passed with the children of Augustus John were mentioned as an afterthought. Ivy’s enforced transition from chapel to the Salvation Army was an assumed normality. Her mother’s death, attributed to the local proliferation of pine trees, was regarded with sorrow but without blame.

With my feet up on the settee, I watch two large butterflies playing in the October sun. Sparrows cling to the bird feeder and my robin hops on the patio. The stupid pigeons try to make love on the shed roof and all the pretty, sparkly things send their coloured rays across the garden. My daughter and I sign up to be contestants on Bargain Hunt. Not that bad really is it.