Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Crazy compressed day. Oh dear: this is all sounding rather "dear diary", isn't it. A day my brother described as "financial loss, emotional gain" (certainly the case for those of us who are self-employed). It's weird that it takes a funeral to get a bunch of people together from all over Europe and "the mediterannean" as well as Cheadle.

It's 11pm. I feel like I've been up for a week, and I'm getting up in six hours to go to Liverpool (an airport I call John Lennon, and my parents call Speke). I had to blow out my friends in Barcelona who I was supposed to be seeing the sights with tonight, and don't know if I can stay awake enough to go out tomorrow night. I'm evaluating whether I should try and get back here for Friday night, or wait till Sunday (the shiva, week's prayers, finishes on Monday). There are cousins flying in from all over the shop, and it feels right that I should try and be here. But I do have to do some work.

It was very strange, today, being in Auntie Vera's 1970's kitchen, with remants of all sorts of tea services from times past, boiling and reboiling the kettle at a rate of knots (shivas run on tea, apparently), with my sister-in-law, overhearing fragments of conversations. Not unlike workshopping a Mike Leigh play. Families, eh? Can't live with'em, can't......

I fear I'm not making sense. Or stop making sense, in the words of the song (sorry, no links, I'm on dial-up).

Oh, and got cool email from an old friend saying that his sister-in-law wrote the Guardian piece I linked about Wondrous Oblivion. I think it's possible that everyone I know really does know everyone else. Somehow. But then some people always say that I'm the sort of person who knows everyone, and I never think that that's a good thing, though other people say it is, but I never understand why. I like to think I have a wide and varied circle of friends, and am generally interested in humanity, but it's so hard to tell, nowadays.

No comments: