Ahem
I was about to open a pile of birthday cards when I was encouraged first to open a bigger envelope addressed to me and Alli. The card contained the towering headline family news that Ella and Sam are having a baby. The information came with supporting evidence—a copy of a 16-week scan (just in case we didn’t believe it). The estimated time of arrival is the end of August/beginning of September.
Gwen also added her own tremendous news that she has accepted the offer of a job as Head of Kennels at the Mayhew Animal Home in Kensal Green. She will be leaving the Battersea Dogs’ Home in mid-April and takes with her all her experience to start a new job with significant management responsibilities. A couple of weeks later, I drove to London to bring her a couple of small carpets for her new flat in Brixton. It’s a spacious flat on a third floor with commanding views down Brixton Road and Stockwell Road, close to the tube station and next door to the police station. We wandered through Brixton market, where vegan cafes were profuse. We had lunch together at En Root by the cinema, then strolled back past the colourful street market along Electric Avenue. Brixton is ultra-cool. A few days later, we heard the great news that Gwen had passed her driving test which, with the announcement of a whole new generation, made the month the best for family news for many years.
Speaking of good news, on the way up to London, I called in without warning on my cousin Christopher, who is gradually and surely recovering from a serious illness that condemned him to intensive care for a few weeks around Christmas. Typically, he is already hale if not yet quite as hearty as usual and is back in his Croydon flat with good company, getting stronger and healthier every day. He has even restarted work as an online tutor. Mine was an impromptu visit (which interrupted a lesson he was giving) but no less satisfying to me for that.
Perhaps I have forgotten but I had never knowingly taken the Google-inspired route that I chose on that Sunday morning, a magical but erratic track that twists and twirls its rustic way to Brixton from Uckfield, through the heart of the Ashdown Forest and the Kent borders. It was an enchanting and exquisite series of B-road discoveries that made me want to walk around the villages whose very names seem conjured from fairyland: Fairwarp, Duddleswell, Chuck Hatch, Cotchford, Hartfield, Hever, Crockham, Limpsfield, Warlingham.
Alli and I looked after Jaxon while Jurrat and Jessie went for a day’s pamper near East Grinstead. Max continues to enjoy his morning walks and occasional visits to the Alma, our local, which is now under new management, causing a sudden and miraculous multiplication of punters. This might be related to the news that the pub will soon be serving food, a proposition that hasn’t yet materialised, although there are rumours of cheese sandwiches. Jessie and I had a drink together there and the improved hubbub is palpable – reliable news for a change.
Earlier the same day, while Alli was karchering the front of the house, I took Jaxon for a short walk around the residential area on the other side of Framfield Road. It’s a random, higgledy-piggledy collection of houses, separately built without town planning just after the railway station was built in 1858, when each builder created their own access track, and no single entity was responsible for regulation, surfacing, access, lighting, or drainage. This turned the place into a shadowy Dickensian enclave, an unnamed labyrinth, linked by abrupt, short, crooked lanes and twittens, the houses built pell-mell before planning rules came into force requiring adoptable and connective roads. When Jax and I had to turn back when reaching an unexpected dead end, a man tapped on his window and pointed me towards a tiny twitten, almost invisible, threaded haphazardly between houses, walls and fences leading back to Framfield Road facing the chip shop. These mysterious local netherlands reminded me powerfully of the medieval mazes of Sevilla, Avignon, Genoa, or Bruges. Uckfield surely has many hidden surprises.
Yours from the matrix,
Lionel