'There is a snake in the grass...'

Tom can't remember what the plants are he's just put in, and has to go and water.

'Losing memory' he says 'cuts me off from myself. It's worse than deafness cutting me off from other people.'

Yet it's really only words he loses. He misremembers some things, I'm sure, though of course he's sure he doesn't, because he has an imagination that visualises very easily and acutely and then he confounds that with actual memory. For example he's convinced he really saw and heard Tony Banks on TV in parliamentary question time, when Norman Tebbitt stood up to speak, say 'What's he doing out? It's not dark yet!', when in point of fact (as far as my facts are concerned anyway), that was only an anecdote told by Austin Mitchell on the radio. But anyway. My brother assures me this type of disagreement as to What Actually Happened is a function of the marital bond and there's no point worrying about it.

My mother cursed her disappearing memory for words, which anyone from outside found almost absurd, since she remembered so much so accurately - too much sometimes, and rather one-sidedly. But you can't tell someone that their verbal memory loss is normal and unimportant. I can't say I even tried. Sometimes it happens to me now, and I certainly repeat stories. The good thing is everybody else has usually forgotten them too. I also remember too much too accurately and one-sidedly.

It was 'laurel', the word he couldn't remember. Every year when the laurel hedge is cut, whatever is done with the cuttings, a few take root of their own accord. They're usually made use of. So Tom, who's recovered considerable strength of body and spirit, has been clearing some weedy ground at the bottom of the garden to plant them in.

He has company. The grass snakes like next door's large pond. One swam underneath me while I was sitting on the roughly made diving platform over it. I shuddered a little. When Jean lived there, he maintained the pond for swimming in, and killed a grass snake he found there. He wasn't a barbarous or unkind man, but many people can't abide a snake around, even a non-venomous one. Tom's very calm and compassionate about this one; his main fear is of harming it accidently with a spade, or treading on it while it nestles in the warmth under the black polythene we put down to suppress weeds.

'What do they eat?' he asked this morning.

'Oh, frogs, mainly, I think,' I replied 'that's why they like the pond.'

'And toads?'

'Mm. Probably.'

'Oh god. I don't want to know any more. Sometimes I curse my imagination.'

He came hurrying up the garden later, beckoning.

'It's eaten' he said ruefully.

The bulge visible in the photograph is evidence. It's not clearly toad-shaped. It was obviously preoccupied with digestion and rather slow, which gave me time to photograph it.

~~~

Memory loss isn't bothering me too much yet. Other signs of aging are, I suppose. Weight gain, because I feel there's a sense of failure about it: I could do something about it, sagging in general is rather depressing. Grey hair, no. I've been getting grey hairs for at least fifteen years now, and have never, ever, wanted to disguise them. I don't have a principle, dogma or politic about it, I don't mind what other people do, but I'm perfectly happy with my hair as it comes, apart from anything I don't want to be enslaved to hair dye, and touching up roots. The grey is a part of me and my sense of myself. Tom, who sometimes expresses a wish that I would grow it a bit longer, likes it too, so I suppose that helps, but even if he didn't I think it would make no difference.

I turned up at E's for a yoga session. E loves henna, which suits her.

'Your hair is so nice now, at that length.' she said ' And your natural colour, it's really good. I don't know why J says you should paint it.'

'Does she, now?'

'Yes. Didn't she tell you?'

'No. She tells me how nice it looks and how I don't need to colour it.'

'Oh. It was a long time ago,' (back-pedalling as far and as fast as her candid Dutch temperament will allow) 'when we were talking about her doing hers, and how B does hers, and I use henna. And she said "I don't know why when Lucy is so young and has such nice hair she lets it stay grey..." '

'You're doing it again, E' I said 'telling people what somebody said about them. When are you going to learn?'

'Oh god. It's another one of those English things I don't understand...'

I think how odd it is that J has known me quite a long time now and hasn't cottoned on that not covering my grey hair is quite an important part of who I am. I'm slightly miffed at her talking that way behind my back. Then I remember I've cheerfully bitched about her behind her back to the whole blogosphere, and convert my attitude to ironic amusement, lest the bits of broken glass from the glasshouse do me a nasty.

~~~

Lovely toad-phobic sister rang from her home, where she re-alighted yesterday having completed her French visit with a few days at our brother's.

'My hair's got minky-pink and inky-blue streaks in it!' she said 'and my lovely Italian hairdresser was so pleased with his work he pinched me on the cheek like I was a two-year-old!'

Momentarily I experience unfamiliar hair-dye envy. I tell her about what E said.

'Oh, that's not bitching!' she chuckled 'It's just one of those things...'

I tell her about the grass snake, and its post-prandial bulge.

'They eat slugs and snails...' she asserted

'And toads.' I said ' This was definitely too big to be a slug or snail.'

'Oh god,' she said ' I don't want to know any more...'

(The snakes been sloughing its skin too, 'weed wide enough...').