My daughter entered my room this morning, beautifully made up, hair straight, her new baggy pants swishing around her ankles. Her perfume and freshly washed hair competed with the subtle fragrance of the garden roses on my desk. She startled me, one minute the room was empty, the next it was pulsating with her presence. Our new carpets are sound absorbers to the detriment of the heart.
She was ready for our little jaunt into town and asked,
“What time are we leaving? 1026?”
To which I replied,
“Actually I thought we’d leave at 1030, 1026 is a little too randomly precise!”
She cocked her head and looked at me as if I was mad, her blondness living up to its reputation…but just for a moment. When her head cleared she smiled her radiant smile and said,
“I don’t know why I said, ‘1026,’ it is a random time, isn’t it? I was convinced, for some reason, that you’d said, we were leaving at 1026!”
“Must be all those buses you’ve been catching.” I said!
Not only buses but the trains. When we go to Victoria, the busiest station in England, the departure times unabashedly show off the station master’s facility to come up with the most original combination of hours and minutes.
Is there a competition that the pubic aren’t aware of?
In normal life these times are summarily passed over as mere stepping stones on their way to more sturdy times such as 1015, 1630 or 2145, or the top of the hour.
The devisers of the train and bus schedules are proud of their exactness and the trains really do start pulling out of the station at the precise moment they are scheduled.
Consider,
the 1547 to Orpington,
the 0703 to Croydon
the 2017 to Beckenham Junction
the 1122 to Salisbury
the 1631 to Bath
and the 0557 to Bromley.
Of course everything goes to pot when there is a point failure or a traffic jam.
So, I’ll see you tomorrow at precisely 1314 for another peek through the window of my life.
Well hello there! My name is Vivienne McNeny.
I am an empty nester exploring life as a Boomer…you could say I'm happily Boomering along!
As a homeschooling Mum I have finally quit the job of role model and mentor to my four children. I do what I want to do, eat when I feel like it, enjoy life with my blue eyed cowboy and clean my house once a month or so whether it needs it or not!
In true English form I write about the emergence of my true identity now that I can no longer hide behind my children as their Mum.
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