Saturday night and Sunday morning

Tom asked when I was going to put anything new on here. I grumbled about when have I had a chance etc, but in fact I've started a couple of things, rambled on at length, realised they were going nowhere, lacked point and structure, felt a bit pissed off, left them to go stale in drafts where they are still hanging around. I've felt a bit lame and unmotivated; I've recently lectured someone very pompously about writing with conviction and self-editing, which has made me a little self-conscious and remorseful ... I've also been looking at Charlie Waite's landscape photos which has also left me feeling somewhat hopeless. Daft, 'for always there will be greater and lesser persons...' In general, I've been grumpy, negative, rather out of sorts,

But now I feel an ineluctable cheerfulness and tranquillity coming over me, for it is Saturday night and I have spent a good day.

I spent a couple of hours in paid English conversation, I hesitate to call it teaching when it is so easy and pleasant. Anais is taking the world, or at least Lannion Students' Radio, by storm, and the wonderful thing is she comes home most weekends, and still wants to give up her grasse matinee to tell me all about it in English. I don't have too much trouble dispensing with my envy and sorrow that a) I am no longer that young, gorgeous, confident and full of hopes,plans and dreams, and b) I never was. I simply enjoy watching her being so.

I braved a couple of shops, les soldes having only just got under way here but as it was still pre-lunchtime they were quite manageable, picked up a jigsaw, a 1000 piecer of the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from which we made rather scurrilous and doubtless post-Freudian deductions as to what precisely Adam and Eve were about to engage in when first interrupted by the Serpent, for Tom, so he can absorb himself in that and forget to flagellate himself about not freezing off sundry parts of his anatomy indoors or out in weeding the garlic bed or painting another still-life in the unheated and uninsulated part of the loft he is pleased to call his studio. I also bought a cut priced pack of tweedy chunky yarn with a big circular needle with which to knit... I don't know what but something really easy.

I later ventured into larger town and picked up the 'Radio Times' and a print of the factory window photograph ( on the header) that was asked for by a much-valued on-line friend lately gone underground, who momentarily surfaced long enough to stroke my ego with this very flattering request. I managed to escape eventually from the ravening hordes of sale-going shoppers who, typically, had woken up and crawled from the woodwork some time late in the afternoon. I curse the day, relatively recent, that the French discovered consumerism. Molly and I soothed our frazzled nerves in the arboretum, where I reacquainted myself with the Powershot in taking some macros of tree-fungi, which I haven't yet picked over. Not a bad Saturday really.

It is Saturday night, and tomorrow is Sunday.

I wonder if you can judge how genuinely happy you are by how much you like Sundays? People unhappy in full-time work, notably teachers, suffer from Sunday night depression and anxiety, which in my recollection, often started as early as waking on Sunday morning. Years ago at university, I remember a lad who had been fruitlessly trying to chat up a girl at a party, who had said she was not sure she was ready, she had been hurt before ... He said he hadn't been asking for anything like that anyway, he didn't want 'one of those Roath Park on Sunday relationships'. While I wouldn't like to pass judgement on his attitude to the opposite sex, that did exactly sum up a certain state of being. Roath Park was a wonder of Victorian/Edwardian town planning, a string of landscaped and planted jewels of gardens, bowling greens, tennis courts, culminating in a charming boating lake. But the mood of despairing, restless accidy and apathy that haunts my memories of it when in 'one of those kind of Roath Park on Sunday relationships' haunts me still. The wrongness of it, life rubbing like a shoe that didn't fit and could never be made to.

Sundays now, however, are a different matter: a satisfying blend of loose togetherness and being entirely free to please myself, and alwaysseeming rich in possibility. I often find I work harder at something around the house than I would on other days, but always with the feeling that it's by choice, quite free from constraint. I'll probably get up early, but may well go back to bed. I may listen to the radio, may read, may walk and take photos, may watch some telly, may even do some ironing, may well read some blogs, whatever I choose. I'll probably strip some meat off tonight's roast chicken and make some soup, or perhaps fricassee with rice. And Sunday also has the distinction of being Sherry at Lunchtime Day. In fact it isn't sherry, because you can't get it here, but Muscat de Rivesaltes or white port, which is nearly as nice though it doesn't quite evoke the precise nostalgia of the smell of the sideboard cupboard and the felty action of its opening and closing. We have it other days sometimes too, and but always on a Sunday.

Really, my cup - if not my sherry glass - runneth over.

( I had set myself a time limit on this, to make sure I finished and didn't fritter and blather. Photos will have to wait!)