Cogitating

The best friend you can have when you are ill and live alone is the dishwasher. Not having to watch the dirty dishes mount up until you are forced to stand and tackle them is a real treat. Other best friends are friends, obviously, who ring you up and send you text messages and offer to come round and bring you anything you need. Worth their weight in gold, they are. Last night I coughed and hacked until I thought my innards would tear. I woke feeling a bit out of it, but I had to get moving because both Nick the gardener and the Waitrose delivery man were coming and they arrived together on the dot of 9. I left them both to it once I'd unlocked the back door, one to empty my shopping onto the kitchen table and the other with a list of jobs to get on with. Nick was very sprightly this morning, full of energy, and he got to the lawn cutting by midday. But what possessed him to lower the cutting head on the mower? It'll soon grow back, he said reassuringly as I bit back the question I longed to ask: Why? But he's done good work otherwise, and it's great having him, especially now that I'm incapacitated.

I've started re-reading Angela's Ashes, my third time I think. I'm not sure why I've picked it off the shelves because it's a bloody depressing read, what with the feckless drunken Irish father, the starving, freezing, filthy children and the dozy mother. The first time I read it I thought it was a masterpiece, a true original, and I still do. But stories of irresponsible parents who don't behave properly and make sure their children are well cared for really upset me. And yet they survived, well two out of the five did anyway, even if only the author ended up as a respectable parent himself. The other, a drunken Irish fool like his father with the gift of the gab aka a load of blathering hot air that he spouted in a constant stream of poetic bullshit, died from too much of the hard stuff. How I loathe such people, charmers and flatterers whose words are empty and whose lives are so meaningless and worthless. In my opinion. I can see that touched a nerve. Discuss.