coming together and crashing apart

It has been a while since I last posted something. Unlike Ernest Hemingway, my life does not  revolve around siting at a typewriter by a window overlooking a bullfight. What with making 100s of nori rolls for my son's birthday party, keeping Victoria safe from problem gambling, cleaning the grouting in the shower, arguing with some stupid landlord about the need to replace his back fence, keeping my mother flush with cigarettes and pyjamas, working out at the gym to stop my bones thinning away to nothing and making sure my online scrabble average score doesn't fall below 60 per cent, there isn't that much time left.

Oh, and writing my novel. That's taken up a bit of time too. I know that EH would sympathise with this because sometimes he had to choose between drinking absinthe with Pablo and working out a way to save The Old Man and the Sea from turning into what we nowadays would call a Rex Hunt type adventure story. It's good he didn't always opt for the drink.

But finally, here I am tapping away and the renovation is finished. There's still a few things to do - new front fence, a sail to keep out the sun (not a major issue right now) and blinds.

 We've even got a sofa bed and a low lying lazy thing to put the television and audio system on.

As you can imagine, I was feeling pretty smug about things when my son rang me to tell me he had been in an accident. He wrote off his dad's car. He was fiddling with the radio dial when pulling out of a park and collected a taxi. Thank goodness he, his friend and everyone in the taxi were OK.

When he rang he put me onto the tow truck driver to sort out what to do with the car. In his mind, mum's can still do anything. At twenty-one my son is still so young.

The tow truck driver put me back onto my son. He told me that the passenger in the taxi was about eighty so he checked that she was all right and fetched a glass of water for her. I don't know where you get glasses of water from after car accidents. I guess he must be very resourceful.

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