Wherever you go you take you with you. Not a new discovery. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it better (among others). Here's another one: Would you be happy married to you? It's about living with yourself. i have been alone so long, widowed 40 years now, that I need solitude. The onslaught of thought is so daily (that dreaded word), that I need a lot of time to cope with it. So, here I am, as I reported, pausing to cat-sit and write in a strange city, house, environment, and alone again, I mean really alone. Those are the words of a song: "alone again, naturally". I can hum it, too. Don't get maudlin. When I was doing my research for my books about bereavement I found a statistic that is still valid. For every hundred women starting out on "life's path", 75 of them will end up alone. It depends where "end" ends. It goes on. The singleness will be for different reasons: single and never married; married and divorced or married and widowed (the numbers are reversed on this but the result is the same). By now, as one of the 75 and counting, I welcome it. Happy is not the operative word, though. Aim for content.

I am trapped, of my own free will, in a strange house in a strange city with an alien cat while its owners are away. I usually do well by voluntary confinement, and I hope to do so this time. I remember a story told about Barbara Hutton, the millionairess, called the "Poor Little Rich Girl", whose first husband, on their honeymoon, locked hr in her cabin on board a luxury ship and didn't let her out for the duration of the crossing, to help her lose weight. She lost weight and health and love and trust. I suppose I might lose some weight, too, although my friends' freezer is full and I brought lots of vegetables with me, but my purpose is not loss but gain. I intend to go home with a completed manuscript of a book I have been working on for five years. I'm very close, with about 20,000 words to go, not straightforward words, though, but fill-in the gaps, explain and enlarge, clarify and embellish words. That's why I need to be trapped, to force me to focus. And remember to feed the cat.