prickles

Prickly but unbowed - if not as pretty - pretty much sums up Granny's life and self both, just now. For the first time for two days she is alone in the house apart from Mr Handsome and Feline Houdini, currently wrecking the seat on the chair behind her.

Electricity keeps on tripping as visitors attempt to keep warm, dry their hair, make cups of tea etc. Gas bottles have been acquire to run heaters, which helps, unfortunately one evening uses them up and since entire island is cold like us, and finds as we do that their systems won't carry much in the way of electric radiators they too have resorted to gas. Bottles are therefore hard to attain and tomorrow, wouldn't you know, is yet another Fiesta (carnival this time) so after 12 oc'clock all possible outlets will be closed. Merrily merrily. It turns out that extra potencia can be supplied, illegally, circumnavigating electricity company so this will be done - but not till Wednesday (see Fiesta, as above.) Granny is also contemplating investigating wind and solar power; expensive to instal but much more environmentally pc. Good.

Otherwise all goes well enough. Granny had not expected all the southern accents...house sounds like Scarlet O'Hara meets LadyBird Johnson (boy, does that date her..) with a bit of Driving Miss Daisy thrown in. Never realised people actually did say 'yo'all' outside fiction - THEY DO. Add some very tight-lipped English rewrite of Tennessee Williams (Granny never tight-lipped but never mind) plus heavy rain storms, plus, just now, Handsome working on outside lights both of which also animate tripswitches and you have life chez Granny and Beloved in the week of February 6th 2005.

Back to minds, souls as in last post. The saddest of all saddest things is that even when the mind is half gone, emotions are as powerful as ever. Sadness, depression etc clings on amid all the confusions of dementia or brain-damage. Seems unfair, doesn't it. But what's fair about life? Tiresome Terrier, for example, killed a stone curlew two days ago - very dramatic and not so common bird obviously incubating a clutch of eggs; TT wouldn't have got near her otherwise. Granny who loves her birds considers this another if less painful example of it's being unfair. But so what?

Phew. Despite being thrown off internet 3 times in the course of this post, she's made it!!