I find it absurdly difficult to try to compose a sentence on a small iPhone with an adult finger. Two sentences together bring about too many errors and random auto corrections. A whole blog post makes me laugh.
So I am laughing to myself in the back of the car. I have so much to write that it is hilarious.
It is a good opportunity to write while Isabelle speaks fast French in the front of the car with the boyfriend of her niece. I can’t hear properly over the car air conditioning ( which is necessary to prevent sleep as we progress towards the Sud). Forty five minutes have passed and six English words have been spoken. I feel bad about my lack of practice this year. But I know when we get to Toulouse, to her niece’s house, everybody will slow down. I will speak every French word that I know in conversation and they will speak every English word they know and we will all be in the same bateau with Isabelle as Chef de Communication. She is good that way.
Before we came to France, I set myself the challenge (having found that challenges work better for me than good intentions) to write a snippet of a different piece of music each day in August. My self imposed regulations state that they must be no longer than 30 seconds. I sometimes do not hold with regulations... And there have been a couple of prerecorded ones, knowing that on travelling days like today, recording would be impossible. The snippets, appropriately, largely reflect circumstances, thoughts and feelings.
Among the things that I can’t write about with one slow finger, are my girl, how much I love her, and the sadness and worry that being a mother sometimes brings. I will save those snippets for another time though, when I have a keyboard. I also want to write about the joy of having my sister, Shairen, and my recently discovered brother, Nicholas, coming to stay with us in Applecross. Great things to write there and four snippets to share. I am not sure that I will write any more about Dad. The situation is the same as it was - he is still not my Facebook friend and nor does he respond to Emma’s messages either. (Emma Elliott was my second Facebook account for a few months when things reached Too Low in Applecross. ) There is no direct snippet for that, but I would say that an air of melancholy runs through most of my snippets.
Hurray to being in France (!) and, it being later than we usually go (we are normally back in Scotland by now), hurray to the temperature (!). It really is quite bearable. I have a couple of French sounding snippets which I have written in the last couple of days. Isabelle says no, they are only French sounding to the Brits. I apologise in advance to the French. HURRAY also to it being only three months until we get to use our shared birthday presents with Mike and Elsa. In November we are actually going to see Tim Minchin atThe Playhouse in Edinburgh. I will need to compose myself and promise the others not to shout out ‘Tim! I a little bit love you! I have songs!’
It has been time consuming and at times difficult, but I have to say that I am pleased with many of the snippets. Some are funny, some are ridiculous, some are necessarily sad. Sad ones include an apology for Ian. The words are very faint above the ukulele. ‘Je Suis Sorry. Tellement Désolée.’ This snippet is the partner to the very first one, which I wrote to Ian, on the 1 st of August, 22 years after our wedding. I want to write about them at a later time, when I have six typing fingers.
Finalement! They are talking right now in the front of the car about keyboards for iPads. Oui, I say to myself, before autocorrect changes it to ‘Our’. Oui, j’ai besoin d’un keyboard.
In the meantime, if anybody knows Tim Minchin, I am sure I have a couple of pointers for him.
