Up in the air . . .
. . . and all at sea, it’s no Sunday Night Football for me. Not this week at least. I have been busy trying to squeeze the latest from the facts and figures over the internet, but, without the game being played on widescreen in front of me I am hopelessly lost.
Not lost enough to know however that the big deal on coming back to the UK was the suspense of something big happening on The Archers, their way of celebrating sixty years of radio drama. I let that one go, letting the newspapers run with that one. I can only care so much. As it happens, Nigel Pargetter fell off the roof of his stately home. Not sure if he is dead, alive, crippled or comatose but opinionaters are suggesting that in line with the BBC left-wing bias, he is going to be confined to a wheelchair in order to show-case welfare cuts from this new government. That poor old Nigel, dead or alive, is/was, landed gentry seems to be beside the point.
Sitting here in the freezing cold of a Devon winter before a roaring log fire I do have the pleasure of Julie London keeping me warm with her sultry cry to her Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home? She has the most delicious voice. The iPod is on shuffle and earlier, before the weak sun fell behind the moor I had the company of walking with Van Morrison in gardens all wet with misty rain. The music is on because the television is not working. We think the thatcher, Dave, when working on the roof next door, back in the summer, might have cut the cord which is now swinging in the breeze. He did loosen some of the chimney surround which came tumbling down the roof and he was ever so apologetic with promises to repair the damage. Which he did. Dave likes my cakes and he knows just when they are about to come out of the oven. I have a photo of him somewhere in the system . . .
Dave, a Devon native, loves his job and he loves this part of the world. He went up to London. Once. And he is not bothered enough to go up there again. Give him a ladder and a roof to thatch and, as long as it is not raining, he is in heaven. Unlike poor old Nigel whose spirit is hovering in the ether . . .
Update: Poor old Nigel, and I know you are dying to know, died.