Tools of the Trade

I’m not quite sure where today has gone but it has slipped away quietly when I wasn’t loooking leaving me wondering what I did with the time.

I remember there was a meeting over coffee with a newly bereaved friend. She’s at the stage of being beset with the difficulties of coping with the nitty gritty of officialdom. It’s a ghastly stage when all you want to do is absolutely nothing and certainly not be involved in details of cancelling a life.

We sat in the newly opened Travelling Basket shop in Roseneath Street which is a little goldmine of Polish pottery and all things Scandinavian. There was one other coffee drinking customer who found our conversation fascinating relating as it it did to WW2, prisoners of war in Stanley camp HongKong, escape to Australia and back across U-boat infested seas to Aberdeen.I think that customer has booked for a second instalment should we meet there again.

The blip is of course of the tools of my hated occupation of wrapping presents. The official wrapper of presents in the DowerHouse has gone. His wrapping was exemplary and artistic. It is a well known fact that it took an unconscionable length of time , battling with sellotape, to actually get into one of his gifts. My wrapping on the other hand is grim, borne of the need to wrap as many presents as possible in the shortest time.