‘Don’t you think that forty-eight is a good age,’ Mr Litlove began conversationally, ‘to start a jewelry collection?’
We were in town shortly before his birthday and we both knew my reason to be there was to shop for that event. Mr Litlove has always loved a fair bit of hoopla around his birthday. In previous years my wall calendar has been defaced with messages over the start of February that read ‘take out bank loan to buy Mr Litlove’s presents!’ and then later in the month, ‘do you have enough presents yet?’ and ‘don’t forget the cake!’ This mention of jewelry was a nonsense though, from a man who’d needed much persuasion to wear a wedding ring. Still, I was happy to play the game.
‘Shall I get you a big chunky gold necklace?’ I asked. ‘Or maybe a bracelet?’
‘These could be my Mr T. years!’ he declared. ‘I could be the white Mr T. I could wear a lot of gold, get myself a mohawk…’ he sighed happily. ‘The things you can do when you don’t have a job.’
‘But you do still have a wife,’ I pointed out. ‘At the moment.’
Mr Litlove thought that this was a consideration, when it came to jewelry and mohawks.
Oh my dear readers, it has been a while since I’ve posted here, but as you can see, not much has changed in the meantime. We are as foolish as ever. I have had every test known to the human eyeballs and mine are perfectly healthy, which is excellent news. I think gradually they are recovering from what has felt like weeks of eye strain. I’ve been prescribed reading glasses, which I’m really hoping will work a little miracle. Even if, well, reading glasses! And blue-tinted ones at that, to make it easy to look at the computer screen. But if it means I can read again, then so be it.
In the meantime, thank goodness for audio books. I’d just cancelled my Audible subscription when this happened, as I had a whole bunch of books on my ipod that I hadn’t listened to. There had been a sale, and I’d stocked up on three Agatha Christies, which were perfect convalescent material. I also loved Back When We Were Grown-Ups by Anne Tyler, Enigma by Robert Harris and Hot Water by P. G. Wodehouse (glorious foolishness). After that, though, I stalled in The Great Gatsby and The House of Mirth. Who knew that those beautiful, elegant sentences of Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton could end up sounding cumbersome when read aloud? And beyond those books, lay the mammoth forty hours of Can You Forgive Her? and the even more whopping fifty hours of The Count of Monte Cristo. Both of which I had bought in sales (the Count a mere £2.50). I may have been overly concerned about value for money.
Anyway, I happened to be in the bath when there was a knock on the front door and, a little while afterwards, the sound of something being pushed through the cat flap in the back door. I thought it was just the post, as my postman has devised this method of delivering books when I’m out. However, when I got downstairs, I found a big pile of books on CD – The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Simon Mawer, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Deaf Sentence by David Lodge…. eight novels altogether. I was in awe. Who had pushed these goodies into my figurative lap? I wondered if it could possibly be the postman. He’s a bit of a local hero, having made the paper over Christmas for rescuing a woman’s cat after it was involved in a hit and run. And I see a fair bit of him because… well, for the reason you probably all know your postman quite well too! He’d been very sweet and sympathetic about my incapacitated state and I imagined it might be the sort of thing he’d do. But magnificent though my postman is, I somehow couldn’t imagine him knowing who Barbara Kingsolver was, and that I’d like her novels. Then when I checked my emails later in the day, there was one from my lovely friend, Rosy Thornton, who hadn’t been able to bear the thought of me unable to read and so had lent me her collection. What a darling! Since then I’ve been alternating The Girl Who Fell From The Sky (very good indeed) with the last of my own audio books, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (also excellent).
Mr Litlove is getting on well with his furniture making. I went for a haircut and procured him another commission – a coffee table for the hairdressing salon. He did have one tragic accident, though, when he dropped his smart phone and the glass cracked on the garage floor. This also happened on the same day that he popped the bag in his vacuum press – it was just one of those days. Although now I think about it, today he put his foot through the knee of his new birthday overalls. It’s no wonder I have nightmares about health and safety. Fortunately, the overalls were very cheap so whilst we hope my mother can perform a miracle with her needle, I could always buy him a new pair. (They were so cheap that when we were looking online I offered to buy him the matching underwear to go with them, but he declined.)
If you get a chance, do let me know how you are in the comments. I absolutely loved the comments on the post about the menopause. Really, you are the funniest, cleverest and kindest readers in the blogosphere. But I’ve been away for a while.
