My new bike has thirty two gears – a little excessive for riding around south London – although that range of emotional gearing is coming in useful in other aspects of my life. Some days I have to be hyper-efficient and deal with solicitors, care packages and financial arrangements; other times I have to slow down to old person speed, drop down through the emotional gearbox to the functioning speed of an 86 year old: slow of foot and with limited memory. It’s not always an easy transition to make.
Thursday night at about 4am I was woken by hearing a bottle being knocked over outside and realized the neighbourhood fox was probably doing his rounds. Sure enough this morning there was a visible and very pungent spraint about 3m from the front door of my father’s flat. It was bizarre to find a bit of suburbia smelling like a farmyard.
Yesterday I tidied up all the loose ends on the admin side and paid a final visit for this trip to the care home to check on, and if possible, cheer up, R. He was in good spirits. By lunchtime I realized it was a case of mission accomplished and went to check if there any available flights that evening / afternoon. But the schedule to get to the airport was too tight and the prices too high. So I have to live with the inconvenience of getting back after 2000 on Saturday – when all the shops outside the main cities will be closed for 36 hours. My trip back will also need to include a trip around the airport supermarket for a couple of ready meals, bottle of milk and wine and a loaf of bread. Good job that I otherwise travel light.
I now have a free half-day here after clearing out the perishables from the fridge, packing and checking the windows and doors. A bike trip around Richmond Park might just be in order if the rain holds off. Looking forward to being home again.
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Well written: life does seem to require an almost logarithmic range of emotional adaptability these days. Do you think it's a smoother ride when you have a partner who can be a counterweight to the silly tugs that we all go through? I can think of times that it helped and times it didn't.
In finance, 'gearing' is the ratio of debt to equity, it basically reveals the extent that operations are running on borrowed capital. Reading your title, I was expecting that you were going to write about whether you were taking more emotional support from others than you were giving...I've got to get away from work more often. Anyway, as an aside, that balance is something I always try to keep in mind with friends.
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