This is such a good photograph, more like a painting that I would stop at, stare and wonder if I could afford it

Three brothers. Three ties seldom worn.

I am very chuffed with this photograph. I went into Asda, the local division of Walmart, to find a toilet. They were in a small mezzanine where "George" sold value clothing. On my way back to the car, I noticed a narrow gap in the display wall with this view beyond. I stepped in and left the apperture and focus to the camera and chance. Click on it to make it full page.

The secret Victorian garden at St Mary's taken by Cathy while I had tea with my mother in a Victorian drawing room. My mother, for a change, was probably not the oldest person in the room.

Thursday

Cathy got up at eight to go to the doctor. She has floaters in the vitreous of her right eye. They are harmless for the moment as long as they do not detach the retina. Visually they are a bit of a nuisance. They started when Kim was given his birthday chocolate cake.

Just now my mother had a moment of lucid understanding of her condition when Dana told her she had had several strokes. Before that Cathy was bathing her, but could not get her out of the bath alone. Thus she called on me to help. After years of my mother's modesty, it was strange to see her naked.

My left toe has been bothering me greatly. Getting up in the night to go to the bathroom, I felt down to the edge of the nail, found a very sharp corner with my finger nail, and, still unwise with sleep, pulled it off. My toe stopped its throbbing, but I fear I will have some explaining to do for my chiropodist.

Friday
Yesterday we went to St Mary’s part of a restored Elizabethan inn in Bramber. While Cathy and Dana went round a secret Victorian garden, Gareth, Mummy and I had tea in a large Victorian room. As we were leaving I asked the curator who was sitting there,what this strange instrument with a large upright expanse of cloth would sound like. He said it was an upright grand piano, very popular in the early nineteenth, but now rare as many had been converted into bookcases or just destroyed. 1826. The man sitting with him was something Thoroughgood, the composer and owner of the house. Mummy said that he was very handsome and he charmingly responded that that had made his week.

We returned here, Dana set off for the beach and then six of us, including Raf and with Gareth scrunched up in the trunk, went to the very good fish restaurant in Shoreham. I had huge prawns in a ginger sauce followed by excellent fish and chips. Cod. Chased down with a mild beer. Beck’s.

Slept almost twelve hours with a pill as I thought I would not easily get to sleep.To stop my embarrassing hand tremors I have started taking two beta-blockers again every night. So sleep a lot during the day. Yesterday afternoon I lay on the sofa near Mummy and, in between little naps for both of us, told her that she had given me a very solid foundation for life by loving me when I was young, as her mother had done for her. Some people, I said, do not have that foundation and it is up to the ones who do to make up for it later in life. She completely understood, thanked me for praising her and also thanked me for talking to her about the things she liked to talk about. The worst thing we all do here is talk about her while she is right there in a room with us. Some of the time she is aware and it cannot be comforting to hear one’s family talking about her as if she were a dog or a horse.

Unlike any of my mis apprehensions of her being with us, it has all been quite easy. I have been a lazy coward however about getting her up to bed. I have not done it once and Cathy, not even her own daughter, has several times.

Kim has returned and is buzzing around, very busy and sometimes shouting at someone over a blue tooth device which seems to be implanted like something out of Startrek. He promises to have an internet connection by tomorrow.

Everyone else went shopping while I fell asleep in a long bath and again afterwards in the Tamlin. Carol came in a watched photos of the wedding on this machine and is now watching the Olympics, while I boycott them on account of China’s treatment of its dissidents and as I promised I would on a Buddhist blog. It seems we are to have duck for dinner eventually. I starve here and then eat too much and fall asleep bloated and feeling slightly sick.

The fish I had in Paris was lotte. This is monk fish, quite common in Canada. Gareth worked all this out for me last night in that very nice fish restaurant in Shoreham. The one with the sloping greenhouse roof.

I did not much like the duck, which had been cooked with great care, but the turnips and anti-pasti including seared artichokes were all to die for. I ate too much and felt chock a block full and a bit sick at bed time.

After dinner we all watched the tail end of a Poirot. As each person came into the room talking, Gareth got more and more annoyed until he was as cross as one could be saying “shut up”. Now he has exploded again with me because I said that the Chinese were as oppressive as the Germans were in 1936. I was about to say that one might have boycotted those games, but he turned it around to say that what I had said was an insult to his Jewish friends. He can only view the government of Tibet before the Chinese take over as a much resented Theocracy. Only Dana seems to be able to argue with him

Dana just drove Cathy and I to a shop under the downs where we bought biscuits for Seaton house, ginger candy, patum’s pepperium, ginger wine and gravalax.

Last night Carol offered Cathy a spa treatment for her birthday so I shall be forced to give her the anniversary gift. I am quite glad of it as I want to see it in our new house. As she is my best friend, I keep having to suppress the urge to say to her, “do you know what I got for Cathy’s birthday?”

My mother at 93


My brother at 65


In an alleyway in Brighton


At the end


The wyf


Another brother at 54


Self at 62




Guests




The house




We sleep in the little hut

I am unable to write my blog as there is no internet connection here. Apparently it is quite common here for a server to be down for weeks at a time.

Friday
We had an uneventful flight. I did not listen to the movies, quite content to glance up at them every little while, but continue with the book, which Chris had recommended at work and by which I was utterly fascinated. It is the first novel I have read in a long while. Over a year ago I read a Christopher Isherwood novel and now it is Arthur and George by Julian Barnes who also wrote Metroland the film of which I rather enjoyed.

Kim says that he gave me this notebook in particular because it will accept the card from my MP3 player or the one from Cathy's camera. Kim has promised to give me a photo downloading program.

Today I am alone in the lovely house because I refused to go to the sea-side. The thing is, I don't like the sea-side. It makes me feel vulnerable and lonely. I like the look of the sea beyond the very civilised streets of Brighton, I like a sweeping vista of cliffs and sea as at Beachy head and I adore the little creeks of sea-side as in Cornwall and Majorca, but the long strand of pebbly beach, as at Shoreham, just seems desolate and reminds me that it would make good landing place for an invading army.

I must go down to the sea again,
the lonely sea and the sky.
I left my vest and pants there,
I wonder if they're dry.

Saturday
That first night after napping quite a while we went to the Indian restaurant in the village. I asked for nan and the owner told me what to order. Did I order it last year? Anyway it was delicious, prawns and potatoes in a medium hot sauce. Slept very well without sleeping pills, but woke at about seven long before anyone else. I had a cup of tea and returned to bed to sleep another hour or two.

Sunday
A huge party in the tent in the garden despite rain. Nick and Juliet very good company. Only one moment of awkwardness when we were discussing the difficulty of buying clothes for tall men and women. Inappropriately perhaps, I reminded her of twin jump suits we had bought. "Do you remember, when we were together, in Holland?" A slight pause and then she said, "That's right, like petrol pump attendants".

Several times, noticing how different we now are, I thought, "I would have driven her crazy after less than a year, perhaps I was already, when she met Nick. She ended up with Nick and I with Cathy. How apt and much more suitable for both of us.

Gina, Mike and the now adorable three year old Sienna were also there. After dinner, Kim opened all his presents and, as he did last year, gave a few. Neither Cathy nor I gave more than out presence, as we put it privately. He gave me a fine and interesting book of black and white portraits by Michael Birt. I read it all evening.

Kim's coloured balls. (!)

Many of his presents were coincidentally on the general theme of light. He got two large lanterns, candles, garden lights and wonderful balls which glowed different colors. I mentioned the big ones we saw in a catalogue in Canada and agreed to have some sent to him. I had also thought of giving him a WWll flyer's jacket from the same catalogue and on his birthday he received three jackets.

Monday
Went to bed very late and slept in almost until mid-day. Went out to a local pub in the Evening and, when I asked if were leaving soon, Dana said quite pointedly that Gareth was certainly not going to cook again. He did almost all the clearing up too, but like a true perfectionist, gave off an air that no one was up to helping him. So laziness combined with embarrassment kept me from doing anything. Gradually all the guests left.

Mike, who is ill at ease in company making stupid jokes and veiled anti semitic remarks for instance, turned out, when I was alone with him, to be very intelligent and knowledgeable. He has lived much abroad, has a very responsible job and reponded most informatively to my questions. If you know me at all, you will find that I love to get to know people by asking lots of questions. The answers are not always what interest me so much as the way in which people stop and think and reveal themselves in the way they frame their answers. Very rarely someone will object, basically to being interviewed. Mike seemed to be enjoying himself and incidentally taught me a lot about his job and about Zimbabwe, which I could not have known merely from reading the papers.

As so often happens here, rather than eating six small meals a day, as I am wont to do in Toronto, we eat breakfast and then very little until a large evening meal, often quite late. So it was on Tuesday, yesterday. At about five thirty we arrived in Brighton, shopped, wheeled my mother around in a wheel-chair, encarred and drove to the ridiculously expensive marina area. Nevertheless I had a delightfully good time. Our French waitress was, we all agreed, gorgeous and very sweet. As I did last year, I had a delicious Caesar salad with naturally raised chicken, which does taste different.

Wednesday
Strangely I slept poorly and could not sleep between two and three thirty. Finally relented, took a pill and slept rather too solidly until noon. They have now returned from the beach, which Cathy enjoyed except for missing her silly husband, she said. I will go in and see if I can help.

We had another excellent meal out in the dining room for the first time this year. Gareth cooked two chickens, which turned out to be just as good as the one in the ultra-modern smart restaurant in the Brighton Marina. We also had dips with chips, roasted vegies, chocolate cake left-overs and strawberries which Dana and I had prepared. Gareth put aside some Burgundy just for me. The holidays here are, as you can tell, largely gastronomic.

After dinner Dana and Cathy watched an extended news program, but when they got onto the Olympics, fulfilling my promise not to watch anything about them, I went to bed and finally finished my book. Woke frequently out of dreams that I was not sleeping.

This is where we'll be tomorrow. It is an old postcard, but the place has not changed at all, except for the cars.

Well I bought that thing for my wife and unless I keep it for later and buy her another present, she will get it in England on her birthday. The way I figured it, unless I bought it, I would regret not buying it for the rest of my life. A transliteration of what Rick says at the end of "Casablanca".

I am at work and will go straight to the railway station from the hospital, where I must take a man for an x-ray. I hope to get an earlier than usual train so that I can have a bath before we have to go to the airport. We are already all packed.

I am taking the notebook to England so I will be able to keep up with this blog while there.