The North Wind Doth Blow….

It’s cold, but then you know that.
I found a pair of leather gloves with faux fur cuffs in the basket next to the boiler. They had been given to me for Christmas years ago.
I slipped them on over my freezing fingers, and set off on my 10.000 step trek to the village to buy a cucumber, a bottle of red wine, and a big portobello mushroom.
Loaded them into my back pack, humped it on my back then walked quickly. I stopped and stood in the sun, I took my fingers out of the finger bits and curled my hands together to try and re-heat them with my own body warmth, inside the leather gloves. It didn’t work. I walked even quicker, into the wind. My fingers just managed to press the button to phone home.
‘Please would you mind, if you are not too busy, could you, if you can bare it, collect me from the slip road near the farm.’
He turned up in the dawter’s car – I haven’t got one any more remember, so to the harshly critical Poppy PeeWee, I would say I HAVEN’T FULLY GOTTEN OVER IT. SO THERE.
I slid into the passenger seat, unable to even blow my nose as my hands had atrophied in the 4 degree wind chill.
The kitchen felt toasty, but only for three minutes, I was frozen to the marrow.
I fried the mushroom with loads of black pepper, placed it on a bed of wilted spinach and slopped on two perfectly poached eggs, made all the more tasty with a cafetier of fresh coffee, heated milk and a sprinkling of sugar.
I ate at the kitchen table with one hot water bottle under my feet, one behind my back, and one held close to my freezing thighs.
The ‘oosbind lit the stove and I’m intending to sit quietly and read myself back to warmth.
On Thursday we are attending a funeral in Covent Garden. A man who died far too soon. He had bellyache, went to the doctor and seven weeks later he was dead having been eaten alive by Cancer. It’s not fair, only the good die young.
Tomorrow I’m driving to Brighton to attend the Sussex Food and Drinks awards.
There will be noise, and booze, and loads of food. There will be cheers and tears and lots of beer. There will be towers of dessert, cups of coffee and small bite sized petit fours.Then I will drive home, hopefully the right way, last year the wind was blowing, the rain lashing. I turned right instead of left out of the Amex Statium,
and ended up driving into deepest Sussex, me howling like the wind.
I am prepared now for tomorrow’s excursion. It’s only taken a dozen years for me to learn how to use the sat-nav on my phone. I will wear thermal underwear to defy the cold, and I will bemoan the fact that my lovely little red car is on the scrap heap whilst I’m driving my dawter’s car with it’s tinted windows, low profile tyres, and a sound system that can be heard in Tulse Hill.
The bath is a very real option now. Epsom salts, Paul Reizin’s book, face pack and hot, hot, hot, hot water. You know the drill. But first I have to run up and down the stairs for 96 steps to make up the ten thousand.
God the daily life of a numerical neurotic.
Stay warm