So, as I do my gratitudes every day, following on from yesterday's post I am now doing: 2. Spend a few moments remembering one of the most wonderful moments of your life, in detail, with feelings etc, then spend a few minutes writing about it - can just be phrases, no grammar or spelling requirements.

And I'm remembering a day when I fell in love whilst supposedly hitch-hiking home from a Global Village Trucking Company gig, one summer afternoon, aged about 18. 1973, probably. I wasn't a feminist yet, just a hippy, though the term then only applied to a very specific group of Americans. We were 'heads' and the rest of the world was 'straight'. We believed in love and peace and nature and communes and all that kind of thing (yes, you're right, we were all pretty middle class) and the Global Village Trucking Company epitomised the very essence of all that. The first couple of minutes of this will give you the idea (I've only watched that much myself):



They came to play a free Sunday lunch-time gig in a nearby town, a horrid modern town, all concrete ugliness, with a big open concrete square which had a bandstand in the middle. I can't remember much about the gig, other than that loads of us went, a whole crowd of us dressed in jackets made out of curtains, jeans with flares inserted by hand, floor-length home made skirts, stoned and smokin' and dancing to the band and generally taking over that ugly town square and behaving as if rock and roll really could change the world.

I don't remember when I first became aware of DS that day, just that I'd never met him before, by happenstance, as he knew most of the rest of the gang - it was odd that we'd never met. By the time the gig was done and we were arranging getting back to our home-town and there wasn't enough room for everyone in the cars at our disposal, DS and I had struck up such a connection that we immediately volunteered to hitch back together. We couldn't stop talking and laughing - we talked our way right out of town and several miles along a grass verge, with a hedgerow, full of birds and insects and long grass and flowers. It was fresh and sunny and we sat down for a smoke and stayed there, captivated with each other, talking and talking, laughing and talking some more, till we noticed it was getting dark.

Suddenly we were self-conscious - we were meant to have been meeting the others hours and hours ago - and we realised something special had occurred and that's when we started kissing...

Fucking magic, it was.

Today has been intermittently tricky, as has so far always been the case just before I visit ED.

I found this pic recently, of when she wanted to get in the sea again, for one last time. She couldn't walk at all, so we had a Big Think and worked out the place with the shortest distance between a wheelchair accessible surface and the water. It was more of a struggle to get her over the narrow strip of shingle than we thought (me and YD), but we made it and helped her into a camping chair (so her w/c wouldn't get rusty) with her legs in the water. Joy unbounded. What we didn't take into account was the tide. It kept creeping out, leaving ED stranded, so we kept shuffling her chair forward:



until I suddenly remembered that this tide would be coming back in some time soon and that it was all uphill back to the car. Uphill over shingle. PANIC!! So I called my Sis who came to the rescue and talked us back into sensible-ness



On the way home this came on the radio:



and ED kept saying, "This! Right, here, right now! Perfect, right, here, right now!" dancing in her seat, so that was a good afternoon too, but bittersweet, what with the MS and all, not unalloyed joy like falling in love by the side of the road.

Today I am grateful for: Dialogues opening; a good and useful and free (for now) visit to my GP - I was discharged by the psychiatric team into her care about four years ago and have seen her every few weeks since - she says I'm doing great, all things considered but has arranged blood tests to confirm that my exhaustion is a natural consequence of all this rather than something sneaky and physical, as it's starting to become a worry; Bloke walking down to M&S with me to get a pair of trousers as I only have one pair that fit me now I'm a mere waif at 12 stone (172lbs) (not hungry); being able to write a long getting-it-off-my-chest email to my Canadian ex-SIL; a warm bed awaiting me.

Sweet dreams xx