The height of summer? Well that is what the calendar would have us believe and yesterday was the summer solstice, normally this would have been celebrated with the event known as Ghastanbury. It has been a long tradition that on the summer solstice or the Saturday nearest to it I held a large garden party and barbecue in honour of my mother’s birthday. This was held at Château Ghastanbury and was held at roughly the same time as Glastonbury.
I decided that last year would be the last one as mother had passed away and in the run up to the solstice this year I wondered if I had done the right thing in cancelling. I need not have worried; the weather has been truly awful with temperatures plummeting and the skies darkening. Indeed I could not have had a clearer omen than the bad weather and last night I turned on the central heating it was so damn cold and the lights went on at around 9pm.
Today (June 22nd 2008) would have been mothers 92nd birthday and as she is not here I am currently having a drink and toasting her spirit where ever it may be, I hope she is happy and if there is the God that she always believed in then I hope he is taking good care of here. Here’s to you mum, hic….. Friends are coming around later this evening and we are going to have a meal and a few drinks, well it would be rude not to and I am sure Elsie would of approved.
Onto the last few days then; Monday gone my oldest friend, I shall call him Captain Pugwash, came to see me and after a good few drinks and chewing the fat reminiscing over old times I poured him into a taxi. He is not sure about my leaving next year and we had a heated debate about it. All in good humour but we certainly got our points across to each other. Tuesday and I paid a visit to another long standing friend of mine, Florence Nightingale because she used to be a nurse until an accident with a parachute jump ended her career. I have no idea where the time goes to but I realised on Tuesday that there are many friends I do not see or communicate with as much as I want to. There is always something that distracts me. FN and I came to realise that we had not seen each other for almost 15 months although we had sent the odd email to one and other.
Time is flying by and in another 9 months I will not be here or at least I hope I won’t be. Actually trying to see everyone before I go is going to be a problem and I can only hope friends will keep reading the blog and emailing me to stay in touch. Well its almost dinner time and there is a bottle with my name on it. I am going to have a drink for my mum. Cheers Elsie.