I woke up in the night recently wondering whether I was being a total prat by thinking I can walk up a mountain for seven days! It is so easy to get things totally wrong it seems these days – or do I just feel that as I am getting older? It seems no effort at all to innocently do things that are open to misinterpretation, or perhaps in the case of me thinking I can get up Kili, just plain daft!
At Catching Lives, the charity for Canterbury homeless people, where I cook with three other lovely people every Wednesday, it seems easy for us to do things in innocence, which are open to misinterpretation. For example recently, Paula made some really delicious home made fish cakes. She decided once she had fashioned them and put them out in trays that they looked a bit dull, so brightened each of them up with a blob of tinned tomato in the centre. When the rest of us stopped what we were doing and turned to look at the fish cakes, we all had a good chuckle together! They reminded me of the iced buns, which Celia Imrie held aloft in Calendar Girls.
There are other things that can go wrong as we get older, with more potential for disaster. Stew and I were out for a meal with my friend Susie and some others recently. There were a total of seven of us round the table, all into our seventh decade at least. Susie told us about the new car that she had ordered. She was really looking forward to picking it up soon. She told her son exactly what she had ordered – a lovely new silvery Honda Jazz from a garage in Peebles, which had been super helpful to her. It was when she told her son that the registration number was to be SK15 VJJ that she started to realise she might have got something wrong. He gently suggested to her that she might ask for a different registration number. None of us round the table could see anything untoward with the number, but I put VJJ into Google on my phone, and immediately saw what her son meant! We clearly have not been keeping up with our reading – though I don’t know whether “Fifty Shades of Grey” is exactly my thing. Happily Susie has managed to arrange for a different number for her car: when she approached the garage to indicate why she wanted a change, they were very quick to withdraw that number.
So I am depending on those younger than me to keep me on the straight and narrow in respect of the trip up Kili. If the time comes when I appear to have lost the plot entirely PLEASE TELL ME!