by I had my weekly-ish chat to my aunt today. At the start, I mentioned the weather as a way of making small talk. When I told her it was hot here, she corrected me by saying that no, it wasn’t hot where she was, as if her weather was the correct weather, as if her poxy village was the only place on the planet that even had weather. But by now I’m used to her disregard for the world outside her ever-shrinking bubble. We then moved on to a fairly normal conversation, including the awful news of her and Dad’s cousin’s brain tumour.
Dad called me at ten to midnight on Saturday. Mum was at church, and Dad has never been that hot on numbers or times. I was in bed but not yet asleep. His previous day had been one to forget. He’d been struggling all day but he went to a theatre production in Geraldine with Mum and some others – it was one of those fake obligations that Mum imposes. He felt faint during the show and was in the middle of a row with no easy way out. He made it to the intermission, when he sensibly decided to leave. He’s had to change his blood pressure pills because the old ones had been phased out, and that has caused havoc. Then when he got home, he learnt that his cousin had been diagnosed with a (probably inoperable) brain tumour. That sounds impossibly awful.
His cousin is 69 and lives in mid-Wales. He’s been a successful potter. We used to see him once or twice a year when we made our trips over there. He must be at least six foot five, and he’s never exactly been fond of kids, so my brother and I found him intimidating as small children. A few years ago he split up with his wife (a lovely person, I’d always thought) and married a Korean woman about 30 years younger than him. The last time I saw him was at my uncle’s funeral in 2002. (On that occasion his daughter, who was grossly overweight, went straight through a wooden chair.)
Not much news other than that. I had my weekly masked lesson with the eleven-year-old boy today. Any time I try a new game, whether with a kid or an adult, I’m taking a bit of a gamble. Today I tried the rummy-style card game I made up with the pictures that begin with different letters of the alphabet, and it was a bit of a flop, unfortunately. That’s the way it goes, sometimes. After the session I felt sorry for his grandmother who told me she had “a thousand and one” health problems. The masks began to make even more sense.
