Just Another Eggless Easter

Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Sometimes you just have to start writing and hope for the best.

I’ve taken to reading back over the occasional old post – way before Covid – and cannot escape the conclusion that I was a much better writer then. And what an interesting life I was leading, in comparison! Why, once I even went to a meeting of the Over 50s club and was forced to play Bingo by all these big scary ladies in flowery dresses and cardigans, even though I had no idea what I was doing – and even though vegetarian I ate a small piece of ham because, frankly, I was scared of the inquisition if I didn’t.

Once a very old man at a bus stop told me the meaning of life, but I couldn’t hear what he said because his voice was so soft and the traffic so loud. “My journey ends here,” he said, as the bus slowed down, “but yours continues”. It sounded terribly meaningful and guardian-angel-ish but maybe he was just stating a fact.

It’s been kind-of-sunny, kind-of-chilly here today. Got all my washing dry – but that chill wind – I just couldn’t see me “sitting out” with my cup of coffee and the current paperback (The Beekeeper of Aleppo, in case you are wondering).

No such qualms afflicted my neighbours, who were out in monstrous force – as always over any Bank Holiday – in bikinis and whatnot, enjoying their expensively frothy outdoor-bath-for-grown-ups-with-more-money-than-sense, and shrieking a lot. Last night was bellowing a lot and chasing one another up and down the stairs – “tinnies” of lager in hand, no doubt. Today it’s splashing and shrieking a lot.

Why are they not cold? How can they be sitting there in biikinis and whatnot, slathered in Factor whatever, filling their outdoor ashtrays when it’s so chilly? Not that I’m spying on them from my upstairs windows, of course. Just happened to spot them in passing.

It reminds me of all those Bank Holidays on the beach when I was a child. Mum and Dad had at one point a striped canvas wind-break with poles at intervals for manly hammering into the sand. But the beach was inevitably composed of giant pebbles so the wind-break would blow over, constantly.

We’d arrange ourselves to the leeward of it, scrunch our necks down into our anoraks and try to convince ourselves that we were Not Uncomfortable At All. In fact, we were Having Fun. And when it began to spit with rain – as it always did – we’d just fish out the plastic macs.

Talking of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which we weren’t exactly – it seems we are planning to send “migrants arriving by illegal routes” (there don’t actually seem to be any legal ones any more) to Rwanda. Rwanda! Even if it is just a cynical distraction from Partygate – now the whole world thinks we are the kind of people who will, once mountains of red tape have been surmounted and endless delays endured, welcome poor mummies and babies from war-torn Ukraine – but if you are kind of – dare I say it – browner of skin, and not a poor mummy and baby combo – will issue you with a one-way ticket to Rwanda! I thought we were an ageing population, depleted by Covid and needed younger people to work? And even if it never comes to pass – even if it is yet another Dead Cat Bounce – what is the world going to think of us? Right now I feel ashamed.