Before Poirot...

... which I think I will sit and watch with a glass of wine in hand and a dog on lap, having just finished the last of the baked aubergine and mozzarella I prepared in advance as the kind of thing in which I like to indulge in Tom's absence. The nice thing is I forget about wine until I get home then remember I can have it.
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I think probably all things considered he's not too bad, wobbly and tired and sore and needing to get fluids sorted out, but really quite recognisably himself. We were very pleased to see each other today, he didn't really remember seeing me last night but knew I'd been because I'd left a card.
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I'm taking care, lighting the fire when I get in, making myself hot water bottles, making sure I drink tea. The weather's turned dirty and wet and I'm glad of two new tyres on the front wheels. Molly's getting a good walk with Porridge tomorrow morning to make up for so much waiting it out in the car.
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Before they go out-of-date I'm inclined to copy out the scribblings of Wednesday night, creative tension between real-time journalling and... whatever the other thing is. I love those three dots...

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The soup was quite acceptable with the salt I'd begged from the hospital restaurant, and he ate quite happily the noodles he wouldn't have touched at home. He sat on the edge of the bed, and I hung over the rail at the end, watching him.

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"Prisoner's last meal," he said ruefully, then with a quick sidelong smile held out a piece of the roast pork on his fork to me. He was right, it was very good.

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In front of the foyer, in the sudden November chill, a young man paced and slouched, smoking, while a dark-haired, bright eyed girl, not wearing her red hooded coat, swung round and round one of the shiny metal posts. He ground out his cigarette and spoke to her, and they headed back into the building. I wondered about their story, what brought them there, the intimacy and distance of hospitals, and remembered the widowed father of two young men I once knew telling how the younger of them, as a small boy at school, was told to draw what he had done at the weekend. He had drawn a hospital bed, with his mother in it, sick with the brain tumour that eventually took her life. The father had recounted this on the evening his elder son had been diagnosed with the same condition, which, I learned some years later, after I had moved on, finally took his life too, when he was younger than I am now.

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Directly ahead, a full moon hung in a nearly clear sky. The Manichaeans said they knew the souls of the dead filed up to the moon, a kind of halfway house to transcendence. A pure, flat disc of cool white light, looking down on our messy, fleshy, flawed solidity of matter, I could see the appeal, solace even, of this belief. Until I looked into the face of the Man in the Moon, and saw in it, not a smiling, wish-fulfilled benevolence, but an aghast, open-mouthed, paralysed dismay.

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And yet the moonlight was a beauty and a comfort to me on my journey home; there was not merely the road in the darkness, an unwinding ribbon in my headlights, but the land shape I knew, given form and substance in silvered blue monochrome, I felt less of a small pinprick in the darkness.

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As I came down from the ridge into Quessoy, the bakers' was still open, lit up cheery and yellow; if I'd wanted, I could have pulled up, bought a baguette or a Paris-Brest, I saw them there behind the glass. Rounding the ramparts below the ramparts in Moncontour, Christian Turbin, the garagist, square and solid in grey and red oily overalls, leaned wearily in the open doorway of his garage, pressing the button to bring down its metal shutters for the night, a good half hour after he should have been closed.

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The moon saw me in, I fed myself and checked Tom's 'don't forget' list.

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Love and the moon, good food, people and things to rely on. Matter. Much to be thankful for.

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Thanks again for kindness and constancy. I really will be round soon.