Life
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No Birthday Cake
I had plans for today, carefully made well in advance. As I wrote in an earlier post, I was going to give out a special lunch for my work colleagues, to celebrate the end of my sixty-fifth year of life. Those plans had to be cancelled, and new plans made: the union has called us out on strike for a day and there is a certain obligation involved; I pay my dues, and it is for this reason that I pay those dues....
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Appropriate Weather
I commented recently on weather perceptions at funerals, and the way many films seem to portray the moment when the remains of a loved, or unloved, person are laid in their final resting place. Here, over the last three days, I have not been disappointed. Aside from a brief period of relative warmth under clouded skies, rainwater has increased the flow of the river, cleaned the streets, soaked those coming out of the train station and walking through town. A fortnight earlier, I am told, the area was covered in snow....
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Closing A Chapter
All the best films starting with a scene set in a cemetery seem to go for rainy weather. A small group dressed in black, under umbrellas, gathered around an open hole in the ground as a pastor says a few words from the little black book, and the casket is lowered into the grave. Sobs and sympathy all round, flowers and earth on the wooden box, and off we all go. There follows the usual words as people walk off, or the detective in charge comments to the Sergeant, or the lover races up to the waiting limousine hoping that now the time has come....
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The Urge to Travel
The season has hardly begun, and in some areas the snow has barely melted from the roads, but the first motorcyclists are venturing out, letting the breeze blow - symbolically - through their hair as they blow the cobwebs off winter-stored bikes and warm leathers. I sit, almost every working day, in my commuter train and dream of places further afield, of packing a small bag with the bare necessities, and just taking off again....
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The Best Laid Plans
I am one of those older people who is not young enough, nor old enough, to wish to celebrate a birthday. I am past the stage of claiming each quarter of a year to increase my age, and not yet at the stage of adding each quarter of a year to my time spent on this small planet to impress with my longevity. Unfortunately there is never an age when other people do not wish to celebrate your birthday, whether they do the same with theirs or not....
