MY WEEK BY FRANCIS GAY
Susan thought the car she’d parked beside was empty. Then she realised someone – who looked too young to be driving – was curled up on the driver’s seat. She went shopping. The sleeping figure was still there when she got back.
It was only 4.30 and she was concerned the girl might be sick or...worse! She almost knocked on the window. Just then the “girl” turned around in her sleep. She was
The things we do when there’s nothing to do! Betty is normally a very busy lady, always on the go. The lockdown took away a lot of the places she could go and she became more or less a carer for a neighbour who lives on her own. Sheila is in her 80s, loves her garden, but being blind rarely ventures beyond it. Betty doesn’t know a flower from a weed. Today, I watched in admiration as Betty took Sheila along the road, garden by garden, where she described the different plants and flowers and Sheila told her what they were. Sometimes, working on smell or by feeling the leaves, Sheila knew what was growing there before Betty described it. And, watching this, I thought about the things we do when there’s nothing to do. Sometimes they simply waste time, often they are foolish distractions, but sometimes they are indescribably beautiful! a young woman, her face was visible on the lanyard she wore and the logo of a carers’ organisation was clear on her tunic. She wasn’t homeless – she was exhausted. Susan put her shopping in the boot and walked back to the main street. She returned with three bunches of flowers.
One was for her mother, one for her mother’s carer, and the third? She tucked that under the windscreen-wiper of the car next to hers.
Corrine and her dad, Billy, were discussing the merits of Fathers’ Day.
“Being a father was not at all what I had expected,” he explained.
“It pushed me beyond every limit I had. It used up all my patience and forced me to do things I never wanted to do. “I gave up so much I loved so that you could have what you needed.”
There was a moment of silence while I waited to see how hurt Corrine would be. But she just waited.
“Put another way,” Billy continued. “You made me a much better man, more patient, more able to love even when I was exhausted. You showed me the things I thought important really weren’t.
“You taught me what actually matters in life.” He laughed: “And yes, I will always be proud of those French plaits!”
“So...” Corrine said with a cheeky glint in her eye. “If we did all that, how come you’re the one who gets a card?”
It’s just a house among other houses.
There are roads around it and a block of concrete garages at the end of the street. A bagpiper was in one of the garages! I guess renting it was a price worth paying so as not to annoy his neighbours. The concrete walls did a very good job of keeping the sound in.
I just happened to be in the garden.
The air had that pure, clear quality it reverts to after a thunderstorm.
Muffled as it was, the music of the pipes sounded like it might be coming to me from several valleys distant. And, just for a few minutes, I felt I was in the Highlands!
It’s a reminder that there is no situation so mundane that beauty can’t sneak in somehow, if we look for it, if we listen for it, if we believe in it.