Courgettes and Ducks

Thank you to all who have sent sweet messages about McDad, email, text, messages here and Myspace, it is kind and helps the sadness.
It has been a crazy week, going back to work feeling like a different person- sensitive to everything, almost as though I can read people's minds, but also impatient when I see people wasting their lives or being rude to one another. I was thinking how awful the emotional bruises must be at wartime- past and present. People must feel permanently stunned, without any gaps to recover before the next bereavement. How can people kill each other?
Today, the sun shone with spring warmth in its rays. There is ;probably still more winter weather to come but at least the sunshine is fighting back. I imagined bringing armfuls of Arum Lily plants back to the house, perching them on every windowsill and ipretending that I lived in a massive field full of lilies and green foliage. Practicality kicked in and I imagined carrot plants and courgettes, one ferny and the other overblown and growing at a frightening rate.
Bargain Buys had packs of seeds in a rack outside it yesterday; there was no room in the shop for anything else- the ceiling is festooned with shopping trolleys and cat carry boxes, the walls piled head-high with pots'n'pans, paint tins, spoons of every shape and size, old-fashioned things like creosote, tea towels, nails, adhesive hooks, white crockery, and millions of tubes of different types of glue. The floor is crammed with brooms, shovels, more paint, big serving dishes, boxes of bits, plant display devices, trolleys, trays, a crowded counter covered in Stanley knives and blades, screws and scissors, and behind it the man with the yellow hair and beard and nicotine-stained fingers, but no more dog lying on a huge pile of door-mats; poor Chip didn't survive the winter either.
I walked to the duck pond and sat in the sun admiring the funny little waddling gentlemen in their smart uniforms, looking clean and dapper in spite of the murky pondwater. Later, Diana came round and we drank coffee and she told me about her adventures in India, She brought me a sparkly Indian dress and ear-rings, and her guitar to be tuned up. Her dogs wolfed down the cat-food that the cats had been tunring their noses up at all day (funny how they missed it with an affronted glare once somebody else had eaten it!).
Tomorrow, I drive one car to Newcastle and another one back. Sometimes I feel like I am living someone else's mad life instead of my own, like wearing borrowed clothes for a while. I want my own ones back now, please!