who only by moving can balance

Reading. The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman. I have finished this. I have a lot of feelings related and adjacent to it. I will write them up... later.

I spent a significant chunk of Sunday reading various correspondence sent by my grandfather in 1943 and 1944, all out of order, from while he was deployed. One letter enclosed pictures, accompanied by a somewhat testy explanation that he was caught with his mouth open -- rather than smiling sweetly -- because the fellow with the camera had pressed the button while he was still in the middle of explaining how to operate it. It is wonderful.

Also a guide to babysitting a larval (toddler) Alex, because I was invited also to go through the hanging folders in the filing cabinet at my parents' relating to me, which Adam thought was pretty much the best thing ever.

Up next: various short stories open in tabs on my phone; then, probably, This Is How You Lose The Time War, followed by Strange Practice, which I picked up (whyyyy am I still buying new boooooks okay to be fair to me this one's been on my Sounds Intriguing list for a while) because the ebook was on sale for 99p the other day. I meant to tell you all and failed to; my regrets. I shall report back!

Writing. Words not yet on paper, but there's something starting to cohere, maybe. It feels like it'll need a sketch.

Listening. We have now got up to episode 60 of TMA. We both keep getting jolts of confusion every time JonnyJon sounds peevish or otherwise exasperated, because HI JONNY D'VILLE, which is rather disconcerting.

I wish to register my objection to the concept that gold tarnishes, honestly, what even.

Cooking. Broccoli and tofu stir-fry! With a reprise on Sunday at my parents'. Also an enormous vat of vegetable stock and, relatedly, soup. Which needs boiling up, but it's nearly 11 so we're going to bed instead, oh well.

Eating. Tonkotsu! About which I had intended to wax lyrical but also, it's nearly 11 and I'm Going To Bed.

And a pile of ridiculous heavily discounted desserts supermarket desserts; I'm not... entirely sure how Waitrose managed to combine Heston Blumenthal, lemon, elderflower, pear and cheesecake into a whole to which I am largely indifferent, but I am somewhat impressed. (And still mourning the demise of the raspberry and passionfruit cheesecake that was my Fave Supermarket Dessert Treat for a while, albeit sufficiently expensive that I largely only bought it when it was reduced, which might go some way to explaining its discontinuation.)

Exploring. The New Museums Site in Cambridge, because I spent a little while this morning in the zoology department giving wheelchair wheelie lessons. I am utterly baffled by the new Student Services building, and the absence of CUSU, and the through-path past the Arts lecture theatres.

Growing. Plants bimble along. Things not dead yet. Nightshades are actually generally doing pretty well and putting out Additional Leaves, so I have hopes for them yet. I appear to have mislaid my tomato seeds (how) and need to fix that.

On the downside, however, it was purchased in 2002 -- the Woolworths receipt stapled to the distractions advertises the release of The Two Towers -- and is its own standalone device, i.e. very much not the attachment my mother remembers Mama using while she was an undergraduate.

Which -- given the nature of the house -- means there's at least one more ice cream maker somewhere, in addition to today's finds of yet another Kenwood Chef chassis (this one complete with bowl and mixing attachments, hidden behind the stack of disused breadmakers), a coffee grinder, a fourth mincer, and a mysterious thing I know not what.

This is particularly disturbing because I've now gone through as much of the cellar as I'm going to prior to the clearance firm arriving (there is, for example, categorically no way I'm investigating the locked wardrobe that's wedged along a piece of wall behind a wine rack that has been bolted to said wall) and it's... not there. (I was briefly excited by the two potato peelers, previously mentioned, because "a glorified bowl lined with sandpaper and a stirring device similarly coated" has superficial similarities to "a freezable metal bowl and miscellaneous churn", but nope!)

Maybe it's in the freezer that is just getting taken away as-is because No? Maybe it's somewhere under the rafters? Maybe it's in the garage, somewhere, horribile dictu?

Either way, the clearance folk arrive on Thursday morning, and on Thursday morning I will turn into my grandfather: I shall become a wretched little gremlin insisting on poking through every single container they try to remove from the property in the course of the job of work they've been hired to do, in case any of said containers contains something precious.

But then again I did, earlier and at my mother's direction, find on top of the ridiculous wardrobe in the hall, in a nest of dust and spiders and pristine LPs, Papa's commission. And great-grandpa's commission. Signed by the actual respectively relevant kings. Which Papa had sworn blind were Probably In The Attic, and had been keen for us to find, and to be fair the attic would have been A MUCH MORE SENSIBLE PLACE TO PUT THEM but THERE YOU GO, Papa, THERE YOU GO.

When it came to be time for Papa's funeral, Adam very kindly drove me down to Cornwall in a van again, and we loaded the Tramper and the mobility scooter of the Other Wheelchair Saga (which I... need to tell you) into the back, and then he drove us back; since then, the Tramper has been sat on our patio (and, after divers alarums and excursions, plugged in to the exterior socket) and the mobility scooter has been sat in the living room (see above re: saga).

This morning, while we were eating scones, A looked out the window and remarked that the weather was fine... and prompted me to actually go for a walk with him to take it for a test drive.

It was Hard Work in the sense that I had very little lateral support from the seat and as such was doing a lot of core activation -- but we did somewhere over a five-mile round-trip, including a bunch of hills and a bunch of incredibly muddy paths that would have been completely impassable in any of my other chairs and a bunch of just... haring off into the woods because I could. I visited the SQUARE WATER we keep driving past and learned about an entire architectural tradition I'd been oblivious to! I visited the obelisk! I caught a shiny Swablu! I went on [photo] a WALK in the MUD (me with a Tramper off-road mobility scooter, on a muddy path through some woods).

I kept zooming off delightedly because I could. I kept giggling to myself. I kept bouncing gently in place. (I kept dropping my phone, and am going to install a handlebar mount.)

I have investigated ramps to make it easier to get it on and off the patio; I will be talking to my mother about buying it off her rather than selling it on, because really, at the point when this is the face I was pulling solidly for two hours?

Papa died today (yesterday); my mother phoned me from the M5 near Exeter -- "We just missed Papa." I'd assumed she was calling me about the All Blacks game she'd been supposed to be watching at Twickenham.

Nothing feels particularly real, yet, so emotions to follow. I'm being looked after.

They say, I think, that moments
can hang preserved in drops of amber
suffused with bone-deep memories
of setting autumn suns.
In Mass I see the elderly &
think of my Grossmutti, who
placed sacrificial flowers on
the altar, very nearly til she died
& in so doing offered up
her blood, her knees, her strength;
I think of Papa, who still heaves
his way through grassy lanes
to kneel, to genuflect, to offer peace.
And in Mass I hear the children
as they whisper to their parents
having not yet realised just how well
the church carries their voice
(nor yet been taught: above all else is silence);
in them, and in the fretful babies
this strange unwieldy future
reflects me backwards to myself.
That imperfection is inevitable
is without doubt its greatest grace:
the same is true of love.
Take heart. Take strength. Take space.

A little while ago I put a cake in the oven. The tin is from my grandma; the Kenwood mixer I used from Papa; and the recipe was e-mailed me by my mother: she transcribed from Grossmutti's copy of the recipe in Cornwall, which she in her turn transcribed from Grausi's recipe in Feldkirchen, probably sometime in the forties.

Happy birthday, me. :-)