It all takes time, but I am finally here and getting rested (still so tired but better) and serene. Best of all, serene.

I remember a line from a diary written by Florida Scott Maxwell, who kept a diary in her 82nd year, I think. She wrote about something that had annoyed her and vented her anger in her diary and then she wrote, “I am too frail for moral fervour.” Me too. Serene is best.

I used to think—I have told you this before—that by the time I reached my eighties I would have time and leisure to read a lot of the books I missed while I was reading something else. And I did, a few, like a couple of volumes of Swann’s Way and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia , a “travel book, written by Dame Rebecca West (1892-1983), published in 1941 in two volumes by Macmillan in the UK and by The Viking Press in the US. The book is over 1,100 pages in modern editions and gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography during West's six-week trip to Yugoslavia in 1937. West's objective was "to show the past side by side with the present it created". Wikipedia It is considered one of the best hundred travel books of the twentieth century. Those books were too bulky to hold in my hands. I read them at the breakfast table.

Then Covid19 came along plus my son Mathew, who was billeted with me by the family for our mutual safety and I prepared and ate breakfast for two. I have grown more incompetent since and Matthew has improved in his ability to help me. He has worn me down with love and well-meaning assistance and I am so grateful.

But I haven’t had any time to do my extra-curricular reading. So, I thought, when I’m 90 I will have time. Not.

I’ll just have to live a little longer.