I can identify at least five types. Leaves on the decking in
my backyard (disclaimer: not pictured). It’s one of those wild mid-November days when flying golden leaves
make me think of the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz – flying leaves, flying
furniture, flying old ladies on bicycles who turn into witches. Only that was
black and white.
Silver birch (bottom of neighbours’ garden [neighbours who by
some quirk of Victorian development are the only ones in the block of terraces
to have a garden]), lime (come over the roofs from the row along the edge of
the busway), hawthorn (ditto, or from the mystery field at the far corner of the terraces [dog walker
heaven, full of shit, lined by plum trees that bear small but sweet orange
fruits in late July]), sycamore (edges of same field, or small specimens along
the hedge next to the limes) and oak. Oak? No idea. I’ll have to go and find it
sometime; I didn’t know we had any nearby, but with this gale it could have
travelled. Despite living in one of the North West’s reputedly shittier towns,
I’m happy to report there are quite a few trees in the area along with quite a
few patches of greenness, some of them officially sanctioned parks, some of
them mysterious patches of grass and shrub and plum trees. The boy and I even
realised there was a tulip tree on our walk into town the other day. We hadn’t
realised until we saw its autumn leaves scattered across a flight of steps.
And we only know it’s a tulip because of the wildlife club at a nearby museum
where the boy had made a leaf-identification book a couple of months ago.
The tea must be brewed now. Yes, all of this has been
flitting through my head while I waited for a cuppa to brew. Perhaps that’s why
I’m known for my strong tea. Colleagues at my last job had a mug made for me
when I left that read: Stewed not Brewed. I chipped the edge of it in the
kitchen at my current job last week.
Today, I called in sick. Cue many thoughts about whether I
really am sick. It’s not that I feel particularly guilty (sure, you reply, that’s
why you have to point it out like that). It’s that I worry too much about what people
think of me. And the thought that they’re thinking I’m the sort of person who
calls in sick with a cold is too much for my psyche to bear. So I justify
myself to nobody, in my head. Then I decide, completely on a whim, to start
writing this diary. Subconsciously, I’m probably doing it just so that I can
explain to the computer screen and you, my imaginary reader, that I really am
sick. It’s not just my normal winter cold; it’s a cough and cold on top of a
cold. I spend September to March every year either having a cold, developing a
cold or trying to get over a cold. I’ve had dodgy sinuses all my life.
Apparently, this is why I feel tired all the time – even when I’m asleep I get
very little deep sleep. Doctor’s suggested solution: stick my head over a bowl
of steaming water five times a day. Sure, doc, cos it’s not like I have a job,
or a life. Anyway, I tried it when I had a few days off. Sinuses cleared a
little from their baseline state for about twenty minutes each time then back
to their usual state.
Cue another thought: Why did I write a job or a life? Why do we have to treat the
two as separate, as if life is something that happens only after 6pm or crammed
into the weekend? More on that and my perpetual search for the point of it all
another time.
My tea is nearly drunk. I might go straight onto another
mug. I went back to sleep this morning at 9.30 and woke up again at 1.30pm,
which means I have a lot of tea drinking to catch up on. It’s going dark now
(3.45pm) and I’m caught between the desire to rush out into the weather to get
some fresh air – a phrase that carries vast meaning in my life associated with
my uber desire to run away from it all to the mountains – and the desire to
wrap up in a blanket, drink hot chocolate, pluck another book from the shelf
and hibernate. So I’ll do what I always do when I can’t make a decision, or I
know there’s some task that needs doing but I’ve overthought it into some
mammoth undertaking: make another cuppa.
