An arboretum in Essex.

The Call of the Wendigo wrote:

To Manchester?

The North at its heights.

Surely its heights would be those hilly bits with transmitters on.

How was the arboretum? Did you climb any of the trees?

I'm trying to work. My mother is staying here, and is going for lunch, so her hairdresser has arrived. They're in the kitchen having a shouted and very explicit conversation over the noise of the hairdryer. It's like being trapped in a particularly raucous hen night at Vidal Sassoon. The volume these two are communicating at is going to make my ears ring for the rest of the day.

cosmictanya wrote:

How was the arboretum? Did you climb any of the trees?

It was veh nace - in a cold and gloomy and damp and Autumnally atmospheric sort of way.

The light was very strange and the colours of the leaves were at times spectacular and surreal.

I personally didn't climb any trees, but Soph' did.

I'm not sure I'd enjoy that, but then as long as you did, I suppose that's what matters. I love autumnal crispness, but that just sounds rather damp. I wonder what arboretums are like when all the leaves are gone. Probably like the Somme in 1916.

I miss climbing trees. There was a period of parenting, I'd say when he was about 5 to around 11 where I could indulge in public, using him as cover, leaving him in the dust. Eventually pulling him up higher to sit with me and look down on the world together.

Tonight, my mother has shattered an alabaster tabletop that has been securely attached to its moorings for two centuries. I went through to find out what the earthquake was, saw a scene of absolute chaos, and am so fed up of the destruction that I have come back to bed to relax with my electric blanket on medium setting.

This morning, my mother managed to wrench a kitchen cupboard door off. It rests against the wall now, next to the remains of a drawer she managed to shatter over the weekend.

The lights crashed down from the ceiling as we entered the weekend - she was trying to adjust a bulb apparently. The whole lot coming down afterwards was a coincidence, she insisted.

By the time she's finished making the pot of soup she's working on, I probably won't have any walls or floor - it'll just be an empty space in the sky, with what used to be my fixtures and fittings raining down across the neighbourhood.

It's only fair to say, it was very good soup.

I went for a walk in the North earlier. Here I'm not 'hen' I'm 'luv'.

I openly walked the northern streets to my friend's house for the night. We had a great time, except fuel prices meant she couldn't turn the heating on, so the house was cold

I tried to walk down the gym to pump some iron, gave up 1/3 of the way, too cold and it started raining.

'E never wanted to go in't first place I reckon.