annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Eleanor Rigby

11/1/24
Too much going on on Thursdays to be able to engage with what went on when I was a young hooligan. Back to that tomorrow. Today was choir – fab, mainly working on ‘Living on a Prayer’ where for once us tenors get the tune, but also a lot of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ where we have to do a lot of maintaining one note for a long time. And ‘Songbirds’, which can fuck off, frankly.
Then to an estate agent to get someone to come and do a valuation of the house – on Monday afternoon, after the cleaner’s been – I’m not totally daft. This is to give us some idea of what our options might be. I went to the place I’ve always been, back in the days when I was a home owner before. We bought out house on the beach via them in 1994 for £64k. As a teacher on point 6 of the pay scale I earned £15k. The guy said they just sold this house again for £700k. Teacher’s salaries have increased to the extent that Pt6 is now £50k so that house should be in the region of £200k. Where are teachers living?
Ah well, I just had a look at what properties are available and that’s sent me into the pit of doom, and now I need to go to bed.
But I must mention that in writing group today I asked them to start with the line, “Eleanor Rigby picked up the rice in the church where a wedding had been..” and one of them had never heard the song or even heard of it. And she’s the one who was once a pupil in my English class at high school, over twenty years ago, but still I hold myself at least partly responsible for this gap in her education. She wrote a great piece as if Eleanor was the young daughter of the priest, earning pocket money by sweeping up and maintaining a great child’s eye commentary on various brides she had seen. There were only three of us today – the other one’s Eleanor was a bit new age – she gave some of the rice to a mouse who lived in a hole in the churchyard and took the rest home to cook, unwashed, and eat, to consume some of the love and good wishes that the rice had been imbued with as it had been thrown. Mine was a bit bonkers, saving all the rice against some future famine, hoarding all kinds of weird shit that she accumulated from here and there. We also wrote as characters from Bruegels’s ‘Winter Scene with Skaters’ where I was a child skating for the first time having always just watched, getting the hang of it and flying away down the frozen river, and both the others were much more cautious, one only watching from a window, the other sitting on the boat trapped in the ice. Great descriptions, they are fabulous writers both of them, neither with any ambition to Write, just to enjoy the experience of seeing what comes out each week.

12:18 a.m. - 12.01.24

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