Rambling

Remember Higgy? He is far too thin. Today I am taking him to a clinic that specialises in eating disorders. He's fifty seven but I guess he'll be there with a bunch of anorexic teenage girls. I might have an eating disorder myself because my appetite is ravenous and whenever I eat a meal the plate is entirely emptied - bones, gristle, skins - everything. Sometimes I even eat the cutlery.

I should be out mowing our grass just now but hopefully it will still be dry when I get back from the clinic. It takes about two hours to do a good job of the grass and this will be only the second time I have cut it this year. I need to do it today because tomorrow Shirley and I are catching a train down to Derby to watch Hull City play Derby County in the first leg of the Championship playoffs semi-final. Of course, I have prayed to Google, asking for victory. Up The Tigers!

There was a blast from the past when an old university friend got in touch to say that he and his wife are coming down to Sheffield from the wilds of Bonny Scotland and could we meet up? With some trepidation I have agreed to this. Unlike many people, I have tended to shun events like  school reunions and something in my sub-conscious has caused me to cut away many links with my past instead of nurturing them. It isn't logical I know but I haven't been able to help myself. It's like I want to leave the past behind and just move on. A psychoanalyst would have a ball with me.

Yesterday - rambling in Birch Hill Plantation near Scarcliffe

I think of my parents - Philip and Doreen. They met in India during World War II and were both in The Royal Airforce. After the war, they attended annual service reunions in Leeds, meeting up with colleagues they had served with in Delhi. Families came along too. They were  all-day affairs with a buffet meal and endless cups of tea. The parents chattered away about their wartime memories while we kids raced around the old church building, waiting to go home. The reunions happened throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies, finally coming to an end in the late eighties as old age and death came into the equation and attendance tailed off.

But that idea of reunion has never appealed to me. Not everybody is lucky enough to attend university but those who did often maintain strong links with old university friends right through to old age. But not me - so meeting up with my old chum and his wife will be, let's just say, interesting.

I guess I could have cut the grass yesterday but as it was a nice day I plodded around north east Derbyshire after parking up in a small village called Stony Houghton. It was meant to be a shortish ramble but on returning to my silver car (Clint) I looked at my watch and  observed that four hours had passed by...And I still haven't told you much about Monday's walk out of Warslow - rambling around The Manifold Valley. Another lovely day in my remarkably unremarkable life.