I like to write every day but sometimes I can't, mainly when I am overwhelmed with feelings about ED that all the layers and contradictions are beyond identification, let alone articulation. Then I can't get beyond them to think or write about anything else. This last break was due to my building up to a visit to ED - now I've seen her it's all become manageable again.

This is a photo from the other day, which I liked, of my car complete with seagull and seagull shit (insert your own profanities here), taken from the top of my steps which are visible in the reflections:



Look at me parked right outside my front door! How often does that happen? I may never use the car again.

Son came down here after work on Tuesday so that Bloke could drive us both up to visit ED on Wednesday (there was going to be a tube strike, but it was cancelled at the last minute).

I thought not driving would mean I'd arrive in a better state, and maybe it did, but not having to concentrate on the road left my mind free to build up a good quantity of anxiety.

It was lashing down with rain, so we couldn't take ED out, though after a non-smoking journey I had to go out on the veranda for a fag. I love that lake and can imagine that I'll take a picture on each visit, which is cool as it's always evolving with the gradual passage of the seasons. Yesterday the irises had started to emerge:



The visit was hard. She was so happy to see her brother. She's only five foot tall ("and three-quarters of an inch!" she'd insist) and though younger, both Son and YD are much taller, around six foot. ED has this thing of saying, "You're my big[expansive arm gesture]...ickle [squeeze of hands closer and closer together] brother." It was all she had left to say to him, and she said it many, many times during the visit, struggling over each word. No questions at all about his life, nothing to say about hers, just this, again and again.

He takes it on the chin, or hides it, who knows? He deals with it as he does - we all do, and leave each other alone, though it kills me. Yesterday I kept having the horrors about what if it had been him, cut down before his prime, and all this fiercely analytical thinking had never emerged? Unbearable, but it wasn't, it was ED - but she'd always been the cleverest of my kids - who would she have been at this stage of her life without the MS? Well, that way madness lies.

And I'm not saying it's a tragedy because she was so bright, just that depth of the loss feels like an extra twist of the knife.

I rolled a fag to smoke on the way back to the car:



and off we went to Son's. As Bloke was driving I had the opportunity to take pictures as we hurtled along in the rain







This is the only one with any trace of the flooding - includes an abandoned old-school computer monitor which always adds a touch of romance to a scene, n'est-ce pas?



By the time we left Son's, the skies had cleared and the moon was rising over North London:



I took loads of shots in the dark that came out fabulously strange without needing any tweeking. All I did with this was crop it a bit:



Today I have done very little apart from hoover the front room and find the story that I put up on here earlier. Here's the Bobcat, hogging the fire, like the little bastard she is:



I need someone/thing to hate, but I'm not mean to her, I just moan about her and I can't be having her jumping on my lap the second I sit down. The fact that she has lived with me for thirteen years and still has not accepted this makes me LIVID, but hey, better livid with a cat than a person. And I do promise, I'm not mean to her.

Today I am grateful for: not having to get dressed all day; not being flooded - my heart goes out to the many thousands who are; getting my writing back; having a clean front room - OK, a front room with a clean floor, but it's something; a lovely long phone call from one of the other 'stoner-grannies' I go to Glasto with - making plans for being sixty...

Sweet dreams, dear friends and may the weather be kind to you wherever you are - seems like we're all under its dominance at the moment. xxx