Just to keep the more avid readers up to date, following on from Val’s last post . . .
Val has gone to the hospital with her daughter, contractions having started very early this morning. The latest text message from Val says “Pushing now. All hectic lol but fine”
More later . . . .
And baby William is born! Baby, mother, and granny all doing well.
Later today I will be flying to England to begin a month’s visit, planned to coincide with the birth of my second grandchild. The thinking processes involved in deciding which flights to book reminded me of the unpredictability of Life, and about how ‘planning’ for the future amounts to very little more than making a best guess.
2011 may have been an exceptionally dry year, but its final twenty-four hours did their best to put things right. The morning of the last day of the year found gushing rivers where tracks were supposed to be, and ponds where fields were supposed to be. And it found Simon, out dull and early with a very big stick, poking blindly at the blocked mouths of land-drain pipes, invisible beneath swirling pools of deluge.
How very odd. Our uneventful and largely unfestive Christmas Day turned out to be a Very Lovely Day Indeed.
It really was a tremendously ordinary sort of day. All the animal-related tasks got done in the usual way at the usual times, and in between Life Went On. But the very fact that it was a supposedly special sort of day seemed to make a difference.
It was the night before the night before Christmas. Snow was not falling softly on the dark and empty landscape, and no angelic sound of distant carol-singers rolled in breezy breaths over the bereft fields from the silent, unlit village.
Inside the small, old house, dogs and cats slumbered peacefully in the dim light, content in their obliviousness to the very human fact that this was the night before the night before Christmas. No artfully-jumbled heap of colourfully-wrapped, thought-counting presents lay arranged in hopeful invitation beneath the sweet-smelling Christmas tree. There was no Christmas tree.
It was the night before the night before Christmas, and the unseasonably mild air was heavy with a sense of festive expectation, even though the day after tomorrow was unlikely to be in any way exceptional.
Well, more than a week has passed since my last cliff-hanging post, and I’m sure you’re all desperate to know what happened. Except, (because I have been so rubbish at updating the blog over the last few months) I don’t think there is a You All reading it anymore. Never mind. Maybe if I build write it, They Will Come.
Anyway… the long day of waiting passed slowly and inexorably without so much as the merest hint of a telephone beep to disturb it, and as the minute hand tocked irrevocably past the Closing Time for Derby Estate Agents, I remembered that the last time we had tried to speak to this particular agent on a Wednesday she wasn’t there because “Wednesday is her day off”. Doh! Wish I’d remembered that sooner.
