This day I am thinking about the leaves growing old on the trees, starting to crinkle at the sides. the beautiful tree on the green has already turned colour, yellowed, and the leaves are half dropped. There is a faint russetting around on the landscape. The morning looks hopeful, with chinks of pink through the clouds. I think of my small potatoes, some still in the ground - I must dig them up. I think of my niece and her baby boy - I must get those little fluffy bootees to her. I will not be racing in the race I was training for. I feel both disappointed and relieved. A race is a real thing; it will find you out, find out if you are fooling yourself. It was a long way and hard work to practice and there is a sore place on my coccyx. I wanted to use these calloused hands. They had a purpose - to hold the oars, try not to grip too hard, try not to seize up. When? When can I do that race? I am getting old. But not too old. Look at Fran, with her strange skiffing. Better for me than running. But I want to run. Good to run in the autumn when it's not too hot. Every day, I could run, like my friend Marie - oh, she says, I don't run very far. That's fine, because she runs every morning, and comes home for coffee!
I can hear my son in the bathroom. He runs the water for a long time. He does his teeth and his face. Last night he made his verruca bleed on the bathmat and came in to apologise. He should see the doctor about the verruca. He saw the doctor on Monday. He talked about his sore back and his noisy breathing. He must have forgotten to mention the verruca. I went to the doctor on Tuesday. I had never seen this woman before. Middle aged woman possibly younger than me. She could see nothing wrong with my nose - referred me to a specialist. Little eyelid cancer - referred to specialist.
No more sounds from the bathroom. Today I must have a shower. Get Euros from the shop. Go to exercise class - might be fun. Last week I enjoyed the music.
Grateful for my computer. This morning I was sent a new picture by the Microsoft corps - sea anemones. So beautiful. The previous picture was of the desert: its hills, contours. This wonderful world.
Yesterday I wore my new glasses, found them a nuisance, kept putting them up on my head. I am surprised I am advised to wear them. "No" said the optician, "you can't stop yourself straining your eyes by turning the font to large." I do this with every computer programme - emails, internet, word - nice big font. So it seems to me the glasses are superfluous. I am very surprised by the wisdom of the optician, but they have to sell glasses, don't they? A sceptic inside me.
Thackeray was an extraordinary man. To write so much journalism in such good humour. Meanwhile his wife was mad, he had children - two - and his grandmother at home - I was reading last night his account of a hanging, how it felt to be in a crowd for four hours watching, what people said, it seemed so familiar. You don't expect the crowd to have sense, it turns out the majority has sense. Vanity Fair is a great book, but too long. the long accounts of those charades! You just want to know what happens to the characters in the end, and in the end chapter everything rounds off so quickly. On the TV show, Amelia was a sympathetic character all the way through, and although foolish to idolise George, it was a mistake easy to make, and she was an angel to her parents and her child. Yet Thackeray gives her no credit. He doesn't consider her contribution - much - because she doesn't instigate anything, she is passive and at the mercy of events. He calls her crying - "having recourse to the waterworks". He gives all the credit to Becky, for doing just what she wanted - dishonest striving to get to the place that seemed most enviable - and then finding it quite boring. The Marquis of Steyne, what a bad character. Gloriously bad, black-hearted! Thackeray changes his viewpoint though. Like Becky, he can't make up his mind if he wants to be respectable or not. So he tries making a moral stand and calling her a monster - and making her at last a murderess! which is not in her character, as we have understood her throughout - but at other times she is bold and brave, cunning and clever, sparkling and dissembling, and he loves her.
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