Moving House and the Inattentive Mother

Wednesday 29 February 2012 – Today, I move house, hopefully this will be a short term domicile, until everything is sorted and we can head back to Italy. ‘Talk To Me’ by Sylvester, from his last and not commercially successful album, ‘Mutual Attraction’ plays as  we carry the first boxes through the front door.

The day is spent humping furniture, unloading vans, and generally getting frustrated with the whole experience of moving your life from one box to another.

I take a break and drive to the shop; prosecco will no doubt be required at some stage. I drive past the local primary school; it’s the end of the day and parents are collecting their offspring. I watch as a small boy breaks away from his mother; she’s too busy texting to notice. The boy runs straight out of the school gates towards the zebra crossing, and is only prevented from running out into the road by another mother waiting for the green man to flash. The inattentive mother looks up from her phone, scolds her son, and leaving him stood beside the road, she goes back to her texting.

In the evening as it’s Wednesday I join my friends at the Renegade Writer’s group, we discuss each other’s work, before I leave with a dozen fresh, free range eggs laid by Jan’s chickens. I drive home in anticipation of a chilled glass of prosecco, as Tanita Tikaram sings ‘Sighing Innocents’.