Please release me, let me go..

Mum is home! Tucked up in bed mostly but definitely on the mend. Thankyou everyone for all the lovely e-mails and thoughts. We can now fly to Paris tomorrow in a happier frame of mind and get throroughly drunk on Pernod in peace.

I have so much to blog about, and I have been jonesing to write, really missing the catharsis of this blog, which sort of surprised me. Obviously no chuffing babysitting in which to do it though - pull your finger out Mum!

We managed to meet up Brief Encounter-style at Leeds Station with the fabulous internationally famous Ms. T who gave me a letter she unearthed that was written by me three days after I met LK all those years ago; ramblings and musings about the culture shock of being in the States for the first time, things I've already forgotten about, and yes I do mention LK. I'll definitely be writing about that - undecided about how much censorship there needs to be.

Everything on this trip seems to be compounding the 'what if' factor - what if I'd never taken that brief trip to California in '96? What if I'd never gone to that party and met LK? What if I'd put up more of a fight and he'd moved here? I feel so aware of a life I could have had, a weird parallel existence that I catch ghost-like glimpses of here and there. It needs to be made absolutely clear that I do not for one minute regret LK or Anna, but damn it, I've lived in California for too long now to not think that I can have it all!!!

I already have photos galore to sort through when I get home (be warned.....). The evenings here are long and beautiful and I've been trying to capture it all.
The evening light doesn't disappear until well after nine, close to ten really. We've been walking across the fields, the hawthorn flowering in the hedgerows, meadows full of buttercups, cowslips and giant rambunctious lambs. Everything is
green on green and so soft and bucolic and beautiful, until a fighter jet screams overhead from RAF Linton, so close to the ground that you can see the pilot, the sound thundering across the countryside long after the plane has disappeared. A definite reminder that we are a country at war.

I commented to my Dad the other evening when we were stopped at a stile between fields 'when it stops raining this is the most beautiful country in the world' and he said 'ah but it doesn't though does it?'