unbelievable years by katharine eastman

Apologies for zapping out two albums in one day. In my defence, the alternative possibilities I had for spending this early evening weren't very exciting, so I got on my knees, played some new notes, did the same old thing that I've been doing now for about, oooooh, 36 hours, and hence this one sounds exactly like the last one. Also - and this is good news - I won't be zapping one out tomorrow. Look at that sun-thing on the BBC weather forecast. I'm not going to sit indoors on the first sunny day of the year and repeat myself - instead I shall step outside and repeat myself with the same walk I did last week - I enjoyed it soo much.

This time I won't need a map. It's a bit embarrassing that I needed a map last week really - yes it was a new route for me but I really ought to know all that part of the world, being as it was my stamping ground all through my youth - when I used to cycle out there, a bit like a less gloomy Philip Larkin - but I was never interested in churches the way he was, I just liked sitting on churchyard benches and drinking. The roads were of course so much quieter then and drivers were so much nicer and also slower - it's hard to believe nowadays that there was once a time when to hear a car horn was a once-every-year rarity.

And today has been lovely - I made the right decision - having coffee with some people and I was surprised that I enjoyed it - it always comes as a surprise when I enjoy being with people. And then the cinema, where I watched the new Italian film There's Always Tomorrow - critically acclaimed, but I didn't rate it - b/w and with loud blasts of inappropriate music just like Challengers, but it was just rubbish, a film about how Italian women got the vote just after the War - yes really - it was even more boring than Suffragette.

Afterwards, walking home, I bumped into a busker I know and she said we should work together - it is always very very very very awkward when I meet real musicians (ie people who actually know how to play an E or whatever) and my desperate spontaneous excuse today was to say that my hayfever (I don't have hayfever) is interfering with my finger-movements. As always, the more unlikely the excuse, the more plausible it is. If I'd told her that I simply can't play music, full stop, she wouldn't've believed me. People are so odd.

So it's been a full day - albums all over the place, speaking to lots of people, walking everywhere, watching a long Italian film ..... and while talking over the coffee I suddenly remembered that it was exactly nine years since my wife died - right to the minute - Wednesday 29th April 2015, 9-30am, I still remember everything about that moment, downstairs in my old house, her body cooling and stiffening in the NHS bed where the sofa had been - and the moments that came after, all 9 years of them - these things are only possible because I don't have a TV or a smartphone or a bicycle.

recorded this evening, photo last week