annanotbob2's Diaryland
Diary
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Day 221
Wednesday: music, counselling, writing. I'm doing chords in music. She kept asking me to play C major and D minor (I think), asking me if I could hear the difference between major and minor. I couldn't. I could hear that they were different notes but not this quality she could hear which makes major chords upbeat and minor chords melancholy. It felt like she was projecting that onto them, though I have heard it before - Len sings about major and minor in Hallelujah, doesn't he? In writing group we were doing Halloween things, but I don't do Halloween, being a miserable, killjoy cunt. In the end I had a half-hearted go at creating tension and the possibility of something supernatural, but didn't get very far. We were given a few sentence starters to choose from and I went with the creaking door. As it's Bella I include it here:
"She’d thought the house was empty as she pushed open the creaking door but the room felt weird. Bella didn’t know what but it didn’t feel empty. This is what you get for doing things differently, young lady, she told herself. Thinking you can make friends, at your age. You must be mad – no wonder everything feels weird.
She passed through the hallway into the kitchen and the living room door creaked behind her again. It was giving her the creeps now. She’d never lived in an old house before. She’d grown up in a modern house on a modern estate – her mum hated anything used and that included houses. Bella had chosen this flat for its dark and cosy basement but now she thought about it, it was old, proper old, like a hundred and fifty years. People must have died in here and maybe… The door creaked again and this time she jumped. There was a flash and the lights went out. Bella was in pitch darkness, heart pounding loudly in her chest."
The weather forecast had been for lashing rain from morning till night - 100% chance it said on my phone. I know they're only best guesses - there was a time when I was a keen gardener and wished to keep my plants suitably moist. The forecast was often for rain so I wouldn't water, and more often than you'd think there was no fucking rain. So when it cleared up today I bunged that dog on her lead and headed up into the hills, on the path that I only discovered during lockdown. It goes across the main road which I thought would ordinarily be uncrossable, but in fact there are sets of traffic lights not far away in both directions and a place in the middle for waiting in safety, so we did cross it without any hassle, during the busiest time. I hadn't been up there for ages - I think not since the Will Self writing workshop, when I took a notebook and jotted down everything I noticed that had changed since my last visit. On that occasion there were three teenagers weeding a field of small pumpkin plants; today it was all the fruit, fat and orange, squatting on the hill like little aliens.
Also, I weigh less than 90 kg at last. It's bloody slow, isn't it? It's been three months to lose about 5 kg but the good news is I am now officially overweight, not obese. Yay, go me. Three things I feel grateful for today:
1. The lovely counsellor from the hospice - I have four more weeks, and I am so glad to be doing this
2. Being able to walk from my house into the countryside - I don't know why i thought it couldn't be done, but now I know it can be, I hope to go more often. I'm better at walking in the cold than the heat
3. I made a really nice fish pie, two in fact, one for tonight and one for next week, in the freezer. The last one I made was fucking vile, but this was good. A variation of a Mary Berry recipe - she used loads of double cream, but I just thickened the milk I cooked the fish in with a bit of cornflour. Smoked haddock, spinach, mushrooms, mustard, parsley, lemon zest, topped with grated cooked potato, melted butter, not much, grated cheese. xxx
11:01 p.m. - 21.10.20
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