I open my fridge – check that I have something to cook or re-heat, but I know I don’t have the latter. However, I do have a slab of farmed seatrout, a what….a two day portion, maybe in a sauce, 3 days. I smile. I can sauce, and find red onion, garlic, butter, milk. I do this, aware all of the time that preparing a meal for me for 3 days has a few staves of the song missing. This isn’t new, obviously, after the gone of a reason to cook at all. But I do and I love to and I just discovered that I had bought a boxful of Rummo pasta, deciding me, obviously again, on recipes. It’s Cannelloni, my favourite, although it seems I have to the stuff the damn tubes and I just won’t so I don’t. I prep the boiling water for said tubes and make the sauce, adding the notwild seatrout. I remember very well the taste of the wild ones, salmon, seatrout, caught on their way into the inlet and on up the river to spawn, the taste of them, the spectacular of each bite, as if invited into their fight, their salt, the ocean on their skin, their journey. A privilege. Not everyone notices this.

I’m watching cloudal greyshift. They aren’t loud, pushy, the clouds, but it does seem to me that the sky is allowing, like a mother of many, sitting back, observing. My days are watching days. I get no questions. It is as if getting old and being alone becomes all about my children. Oh, that’s not quite true because I do get questions , rarely and when they come….How is it being alone now? How do you ‘feel’ about that? It must be so hard to even bother to construct an interesting meal. that’s a question too. I hi-light this because it is how it is and I hear it all around me. I knew it myself when my in-laws, my parents were lonely, were doubting themselves, and I feel shame now. I could have done more, not to ‘Care’ not that, but just to ask questions which stopped them thinking about themselves for just a little while and which might have meant the world, like ‘Hey Granny, did you write today? Hey Mum how are your cornflowers? Did you manage to shift the wood? Where did you get that dress, see that smile on your face, let me sit down….tell me.

Olding alone is a tangle of weeds. I’m just saying it.