… but sometimes it feels like one. I think I am having a sort of diary-ish sort of time, and that is ok. Here  I sit, accompanied by the drilling of  the TV presenter’s new basement being built and the humming of my computer speaker, still wondering about doing a blog everyday for 2011. It has been an extraordinary process. Some days I have absolutely no idea what I am going to write, and if I think of the amount of hours I have spent over the last 11 months,  correcting my dreadful spelling, well it is staggering and amazing. So some pictures and musings from yesterday, which was another action packed day in then life of. I went to Edgware in the morning and got back on an empty train, again. It did not stay that way  for long, and by about Colindale it was half full. A man felt the need to make me take my shopping off the seat next to me so he could sit right up close, although there were loads of empty areas in the carriage, and then promptly put all his luggage on the empty seat next to him and  got his smelly fish paste sandwiches out, at which point I took a little stroll down the carriage with my big rucksack and shopping bags. There are some strange people about…..

I went home, cooked a large lamb stew, which should have lasted for a couple of days, but somehow got completely polished off by the end of the evening. I took a train to Bletchley to look at the MK Dons football stadium, in the dark, which was fun. This is where the  Milton Keynes Half-Time Choir (still time to join!) will be  singing so I  had a little yodel in the empty stadium, and saw where our allotted seats were…. I then went to  The Community Centre in Wolverton, which is part of Milton Keynes, but  an older part of town where they used to build trains, to have a practice with some of the lovely people who are going to sing in the stadium. We had a practice last week and this week, to break the ice of the piece which is a 4 part acapella medley of  ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone, and All You Need is Love” …it is going to be great, and I have done practice downloads so people can still join the project and listen to the downloads from the The Stables website. The songs sound a lot better with a massed choir than just me singing them as a practice piece. They sounded amazing last night, I can’t wait to hear them all together on the 10th December. I got a late train back the Euston and saw this train in the station and thought how much fun it would be to go on the sleeper and end up in Scotland in the morning.

A funny moment on the tube on the way home. I had tried to phone Mr P. on my way home and got no reply on either the home line or the mobile, and I started to worry and  my vivid imagination concocted a scenario of me finding  him dead at the  bottom of a ladder or something as mundane ( vivid imagination can be useful but deeply tragic sometimes). I started to descend a downward slope, thinking about how I am having to get used to being an old lady, as my face has moved south so quickly over the last little while that I hardly recognise myself, and now would also be partnerless.  I sat there surrounded by a full tube of people almost in tears, when a young black man at the other end of the carriage started shouting at me. He was wearing his jaunty pork pie hat and  I recognised him, as he spends most of his life smiling outside the local shop with a guitar in one hand and possibly a can of beer in his other. He suddenly shouted down the carriage at me ‘hey you in the hat!…do you like Bob Marley?’ I nodded and at that moment  got off the tube (it was my stop) I walked along the carriage toward where he was standing  at his open door and he said to me something along the lines of that phrase…’if I was a few years younger..you would be the girl for me, but I am on the rebound at the moment’ and the doors shut… it made me howl with laughter as he must be 15 years younger than me and I am feeling 15 years older than I am… I know he is a bit mad..nice mad, possibly a bit blinded by my funky hat. It was just a really funny little thing to happen when I was sitting on the tube, in my mind gearing myself up to  being a widow and behaving with  the appropriate grace I feel I should have when I lose Mr P. …talk about changing the mood…….

I got out of the tube, rang home again and Mr P. had reappeared as if by magic. Ha ha . He’d been to the local pub to meet his new ‘Green’ Friends and forgot his mobile…..

SONG OF THE DAY I Shot the Sheriff -Bob Marley

Live at the Rainbow -major regret in my life is that I never got to this venue that I have walked past thousands of time…since its closure. And major regret that I never saw Bob Marley live…what a magnificent man and what a band! A little quote from Wiki ” Marley faced questions about his own racial identity throughout his life. Although Marley recognised his mixed ancestry, throughout his life and because of his beliefs, he self-identified as a black African He once reflected:

I don’t have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side nor the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white’