I’ve been most wonderfully sociable today, which I enjoyed very much.
On Thursday, my gardener Wince comes, so we discussed the jobs for the day and then I went to get ready to leave for coffee with my friend Mary in Beccles. But a few minutes before I was due to leave, my friend Pam phoned (yes, darlings, I’ve got more than one friend!) and so – having been invited to dinner in due course, with LT – I left the house a bit later than intended, and then realised I didn’t have change for the car park (in this neck of the woods, car parks don’t give change and don’t take notes) so scurried round again, looking for coins. After a quick text to Mary to say I’d be a few minutes late, I set off.
I hadn’t known how much the car park would be, but I had more than enough for £1.40 for two hours, so that was all right. Then I spent a couple of hours, after lunch, potting up plants in the greenhouse and planting out tomatoes, before heading out to Al’s to give young Hadrian his birthday present.
I spent quite a while with Hay and Pugsley because their father was on the phone, sorting out a couple of new mobile contracts for him and Dilly. “That was an hour and a quarter out of my life I won’t get back,” he said. We had a few minutes to chat before the phone rang again – he’s even less sociable, normally, than I am, so it was unusual … in the end, we finished our conversation and I came home and shut up the chickens. I was barely in the door when Roses came through in search of gin, which was willingly provided. An hour or so later, as she was making going home noises, the phone rang. “That’ll be Tim, ” she said – but it was Wink.
Half an hour later, I cooked dinner, at about 9 o’clock, and then finally rang Tim. And we talked for nearly an hour.
I listened to Act 3 of Julius Caesar while I was planting tomatoes, and all five parts of Mary Ann In Autumn (Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City) while I was in the car. Because you don’t get back time that isn’t spent doing something. But relaxing is doing something too.