A strange day, full of perambulations and connected ramblings.
I’d been dreading it, trying to plan it but failing in the face of the unknown. How to return a hire car, pick up my own car, and be transported from here to there without risk of abandonment?
In the event, it all happened without my control. A phone call from the garage, to tell me that my car was ready, with an offer to send ‘a man’ to collect me and transport me over to Neath Abbey to pay the bill and retrieve my little silver Ford.
Then, alone and without external influences, I drove the car and myself back home.
I called the car hire company, over in Swansea. “If you come over now, we’ll be able to transport you home.”
So, with Graham as navigator, off to Swansea, to leave the hire car and be transported home.
“I feel a little disoriented now,” I said. “As though control has slipped through my fingers and passed on to someone else.”
“Well, let’s have lunch, and a nap, and it’ll all sort itself out in your poor little brain.”
So, lunch, and a nap, and here I am. My poor little old brain hasn’t quite caught up with me yet.
And yet…
It hailed, a regular hail storm, in Swansea.
A documentary, of the “perfect city” next to Chernobyl, populated by dreams of ghosts. And pasted photographs on the walls, showing regulation grim faces of Soviet men, uniformed but not quite convincingly frightening. They were not ten feet tall.
The promise of sausages, just so soon as I can bring myself to peel potatoes and cook a good peasant dish.
Sausages and mash. Perhaps I shall reconnect with my reality there.
