Community

It's been a beautiful day, but I've spent most of it in bed, because I am still not feeling right.
I got up, had a bath, made breakfast, and then started to watch a good film called Empty Spaces about a very fat boy who moves to an isolated spot called Protection, because he is sick of being bullied. There he meets a blind woman...

The phone rang. It was one of my three sisters, we chatted for ages. Our conversation is the topic, in diagram form, of today's blip. Based on my duvet cover pattern... My sister and her daughter have been offered a council house in a village some twenty or thirty minutes' drive from where they live now. It would mean a longer commute for her and her daughter, but the school bus does run. There is a good internet signal (yay!) and there are other, nearer (primary) schools where she might be able to get a job. There is another town, town B, in the other direction, not what you'd call near, but...

There is also an island nearby, with a ferry, and great cycling opportunities. Most important of all (see my abstract diagram above) there is a community. It's not so very different from the village we used to pass through in the 1970s, when we lived further along the road towards town B. The village hasn't changed a great deal, apart from the opening of a tea rooms and a plant centre. There's a pretty port village along the road, with a fine restaurant for special occasions, but it's all a bit further from town A and the village where my other sister lives, where the open-all-hours shop is. Our mother's 'new' village is nearer, though, (it's the same one where we lived in the 1970s) and SHE managed to create a new life for herself when she remarried and relocated, three years ago. She seems to have found a strong community there, even though she had to change her doctor's surgery, and chose to change churches, joining a different faith, scandalising us, who had been dragged up in the 'one, true Catholic church' by announcing that they were all the same, anyway!

Anyway, I asked my sister to let me know when she's made her final decision, and got off the phone so I could hang up the washing and finish watching the film, before falling into a feverish sleep. Ironic that I had my flu jab just ten days before going down with something suspiciously like flu.