Sunday 3 April 2011

The Charcoal Mellowed Mum

30th January*

The charcoal mellowed mum drinks a particular brand of Tennessee Whisky. We don’t realise what a blessing it is to grow old with someone: What a privilege it is to be dripped through sugar maple charcoal and aged in the barrel. She buys a skirt in the cancer research shop but £5.95 is a drop in the deep ocean of the scientific study of cancer. She drinks a drop of golden Jack Daniels and watches a romantic chick flick. Her mind is like a spider, wandering. She has always thought churchyards and death memorials to be beautiful dedications of love. A grave yard is a garden of memories, powerful tributes to loved ones. Sad, yes, but beautiful, especially the rose garden in the canal-side cemetery in west London: ‘Until I get to paradise by way of Kensal Green.’
The next day the charcoal mellowed mum has a whisky hangover. She oscillates between thoughts of living profoundly, intensely, and seizing each moment, and then sulkily thinking,
“Oh, what’s the point? We’re all going to die anyway.”

*My time-travelling blog has been 2 months behind my Real Life for nearly a year. I am now on a mission to catch up with myself. For a short while I'm going to put a big effort in to posting up the stuff I've already written so that I can blog in Real Time!

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