Lucky

I came home after being out from 1.30 to 7.30 only to find my spare set of house and car keys hanging off the garage door for all to see. Luckily no one had taken advantage of this. We spent the afternoon invigilating at an exhibition of photography in Aldeburgh, a large airy space on the first floor overlooking the sea, with a nice parquet floor. All afternoon only nine people came in, so Hugo and I had races up and down the room, me with the advantage for once because he couldn't get much purchase on the slippery floor. And then I picked up a book for sale on the desk, Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain, and I was gone, Hugo alseep now in his travel bed, quite forgotten. Interviews with elderly village women in a particular corner of Cambridgeshire, east of Thetford, north of Cambridge, recalling their early lives in the Fens. Wonderful stuff. Like Akenfield, Ronald Blyth's masterpiece, these women brought the past in an East Anglian village to life. And there's no one more nostalgic for those memories than an incomer like me. Goodness, though, they had it hard in those days. The mothers of these elderly women come out as the heroines, putting food on the table when there was no money, almost by sheer willpower, but actually by bloody hard work. We don't know we we're born, us lot.

After such an exacting and exhausting afternoon - not - I treated myself (and Hugo) to that Aldeburgh speciality the fish and the chip. Plural. I parked up at Thorpeness and gazed out over the sea while I ate, and then we drove to Snape and had the usual wild walk off the lead. Back home, shock of key display over, one of us turned in for the night while the other donned old clothes and went out to work in the garden. It's been another lovely day, and a still,warm evening. At 8 he came looking for me, face perplexed and worried. OK, I told him, I'm aching now anyway. I'll come in so that you can go to sleep again. So I poured myself a glass of wine, and sat down in the garden room with the crossword, occasionally looking up and scanning the ripe barley, the nearly tamed garden. Really, really and truly, no bullshit, I couldn't think of a better way to end the day.