I am still in a strange-to-me house, functioning, that is, working well, and settling into a routine. Pause while I remind you of Alvin Toffler, a best-selling n-f writer in the 60s and 70s, whose book Future Shock was helpful to me and a lot of travellers. If you have to be away from home a lot, or even a little, the trick is to create a familiar environment for yourself so you can keep functioning as normally as possible. So I bring my Irish breakfast tea with me (sipping it now) and wherever possible I swim early every morning, which I am about to do now - nice pool here. That's not what I was going to tell you. You tell me first: which way do you install your roll of toilet paper? When you put it on the spindle is the paper coming from the top of the roll or out from the bottom? I've actually had this conversation with one other person who was adamant about which way she installs toilet paper, even going so far as to change its position in other people's homes. I don't do that but when I have to put in a new roll, I put it in my way. That's fair, isn't it? The less you have to think about things like that, the better it is for your inner core. I actually woke this morning, that is, came fully awake, writing. I think it was worth a blog but it will have to wait because I'm going to swim now. Anon, anon.
on and on and on
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.