O Rose, Thou Art Sick

The last time we had any money was in 1994, when my mum died. We treated ourselves and our kiddies to a holiday in an actual chalet rather than a tent in North Devon, and I bought, on a whim and because for once in my life I could, a duck-egg blue art deco side-board. We bought bikes for the kids, and a painting, and we wrapped the jolly lot in bin bags and drove 200 miles home with it all strapped and flapping madly on the roof of our Peugeot 505 full of kids and dogs.

22 years on, and 'the blue thing' as it is still affectionately known, is now cream, but still takes pride of place in my kitchen, where I could have had a row of useful cupboards and work space.  I rummaged in it the other night for mum's bone china teacup and saucer to cheer me up after hearing that our bonfire society had cancelled the annual festival we run to fund-raise,  (rain has waterlogged the site) and which has become Dave's and my annual holiday.

I know that's it now.  Dave will secretly be glad that he hasn't got to take the Friday off work and drag the caravan out and try to have fun.  I, on the other hand, am secretly devastated that I don't get to work behind the festival bar with my friends and forget our daily life for two days and two nights.  I had arranged my on-call for birth clients around this event and been looking forward to it since packing up and trundling off site last year.

Its so long since I went anywhere or did anything other than live this life, that I can't quite imagine that there is anywhere else, let alone dare to dream that I might go there.  To go there now, whilst I'm still young enough to want to feel cool cotton sheets on my hot skin and conceive of a day stretching out before me with nothing other than satisfying my body's desires for sensual experience to do.

I flick the kettle on and peer at a little layer of sand in the bottom of mum's china cup. I could murder a sandy beach right now. Hot bright sea, cool white wine, midnight mountain climb in moonlight, swimming in a hot moonlit sea.  A young body again, mine and his, a clean slate, to start with magic whilst we could rather than chase after it all my life. A future ahead as unblemished as the cloudless sky, what would I paint on that canvas this time, if I had my turn again?

The kettle boils and I toy with the teapot and Assam, but I just want a cuppa so I grab a teabag and...sand.  It's not sand in the cup.  It must have come from the back of the blue thing. It's wood.  Wood bored out of my cupboard by Anobium Punctatum.  Woodworm.

O Rose thou art sick