Today: Bank Holiday. Kind-of sunny, kind-of not. Scheduled activity: not content with having visited my own mother yesterday, today J and I are visiting P's mother. With, I hasten to add, P included in the party. Otherwise it would just be weird. P's mother lives in Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Forest of Dean; she has a lovely house, with a conservatory, a garden that borders on the magical (more prosaically, it borders on fields, but there is definitely bordering going on there somewhere), and two lovely cats, one fluffy and beautiful, one black and one-eyed and cuddlesome. And, in her 70somethings, she is active and creative and intelligent and interesting - and a wonderful hostess, who cooks proper meals and makes numerous and welcome cups of coffee.
It is a far cry from my own mother and sometimes, when I look at P and her brother, with all the degrees they have between them, and all the amazing things they do and have done, and then I look at me ... I wonder how different things might have been if I had had a mother like theirs. And then I get weepy.
But, truthfully, I should probably still have grown up miserable and underachieving. We get what we're given.
Anyway: we had a lovely drive around some twisty country roads - not so lovely for J, who was driving - and visited a craft centre which was mostly tacky but had some saving graces. I nearly bought some ersatz Lush stuff, but when I went to pay for them, the saleswoman had drifted out of the shop. So I put them back. I am very honest. Plus there was probably CCTV.
I paid my dues with most of the remainder of the brownies from yesterday (we had the last three for pudding when we got home) and with flapjacks that I got up early(ish) to make. And with petting cuddlecat, who reminded me fatally of my poor darling Bella. Which, of course, made me weepy again, but since that is pretty much my default setting at the moment it didn't matter much.
As J had P for company in the car, and they always have many things to talk about, I just plugged myself into my MP3 player. It makes travelling so very much more bearable. It even improves walking to the shops, although not so much that I do it willingly.
