Rainy Days

I seem to be losing days at the moment - I spent all of yesterday firmly convinced it was Sunday - and I am having real trouble accepting this is Tuesday. Think it will take Holby City to convince me. I wonder if Eliot was alive now and writting Prufrock - would he measure out his days in soap operas instead of coffee spoons?

It really feels like winter - the dark has settled after the briefest of twilights and the evening traffic whooshes eerily through the rain and puddles. I draw the curtains now - to feel safe, enveloped in my little microcosm world where I feel secure - albeit briefly.

I am sad tonight - not the depressed, grey sadness that seems to pervade my every waking moment - but a kind of tristesse, a melancholy of the soul. I have so many dreams. places to see, people to meet and it seems, for now, that these will die with me, unrealised.

When I was a smal baba at Miss Scrimshaw's school she would read to us in the afternoon as the day grew too hot for work. I would rest my head on my hands and lean thus on the desk to listen and  be transported. It was alwasy the same book - the story of a man who bought two  donkeys, Sancho and Panza, and set about walking them the length of South Amercia, starting from Argentina. It was probably an dry old tale but I loved it - I was there as they crossed the pampas and called Ola to the gauchos, I could hear the rhythm of the tango  as they danced in Buenos Ayres. It was then , at no older than nine, I resolved that one day I would go to Argentina and learn to dance the tango. Like Chatwin and Patagonia I had a destination set deep within my soul.

Here's the thing - I think I've lost my nerve. Not about doing the Tango although god help whoever is brave enough to partner me. No, that invincibility we all have when young - the sense of the world belonging to us and us alone, that seems to have left me. On grey evenings like this I look acrosss the playing fields and train tracks to hundreds of lights, each one a person, each one a dream, each one thinking theirs is only one that matters.

Should we not dream then? But the grey would win and winter  would be in our hearts forever. It is a connundrum that I suspect many people of  my age face. One thing gives me hope - Miss Scrimshaw went on leave to England and when she came back she had a song and a dance to teach us. She told us that every year in May all of the children from this town sang and danced from the bottom of Coinagehall Street to the very top  of Meneague Street and that then the people of the town  did the same.

And so, in the heat and humidity of Calcutta, with Mrs Loe the pianist bouncing on her cushions with the rhythm of the music we learned  the Helston Floral Dance. I can still do it to this day. It gave me another dream in my soul - to stand and watch as the dancers passed by.

On May 8th 2000 Mum and I stood at the top of  Meneague Street and we heard heard the sound of the big bass drum and we saw the dance together - the bluebells and yellow gorse (the gold of Cornwall) bedecking every house and the dancers in long dresses and morning suits. And it was joyous and held all the  promise of spring and new beginnings.

Mum died on the 23rd of May a year later - there were so many bad days, so many horrid things but that day in May was not just the realisation of a dream - it gave me a memory of joy,