Boxing Day walk

It was a glorious sunny day, which lifted my spirits no end.  I'm so lucky to have Wimbledon Common to go and stomp muddily around, in company with most of the residents of SW19 and their dogs (and for some of them, their new and shiny electric bicycles).  I did a good deal of thinking about what I'll be saying in Ray's eulogy - I think well whilst walking.

During the last couple of months, Ray kept asking me - are there any questions you want to ask, before it's too late?  Foolish me - I interpreted that (or part of me chose to interpret that) - as inviting questions about - oh, I don't know: his relationship with my mother, or his views on the afterlife; or whether I have any surprise half-siblings anywhere, or ... all the kind of intimate stuff that I actually would have had a great deal of difficulty even broaching.  But there are, now, so many things that I wish that I'd asked ...

- how do you turn on the dishwasher? (a fairly new replacement - some of you will remember the saga - rarely used, and when one goes to the Grundig website for it, one's offered the unmissable opportunity to download the manual for an entirely different model.

- where are the spare fuses?  The lights on the Christmas tree have stopped working.  All the bulbs are screwed in tight.  The lights are probably ancient.  Quite possibly this is a metaphysical sign or metaphor, anyway.

- where's the key to the little box by my mother's side of the bed?  It rattles a lot, so there's probably something in it. Cufflinks?  Or maybe the cufflinks were sold.

- which bin is for paper recycling?  The one with the blue top, or the other one?

- really?  Only one burner on the stove works, and that has two modes: off/very hot.

- where is the Birket Foster watercolour that used to hang in the living room, and was taken down some years ago when the room was painted - like very many other bits of art work that then Ray never got round to rehanging?  Here's a C19th print of it.

Indeed, although this had been in my mother's family since the C19th, after I did some work on Birket Foster a number of years back, I became suspicious that it was a copy/fake (BF was much faked in his lifetime) - now I wonder if it might even have been a print, although I think I'd have spotted that.  But whatever ... I was very fond of it, indeed; there are a limited number of places that it could be in this small house; and it's not here.  I have, of course, become obsessed by its absence, and, yes, I can spot psychological displacement activity, thank you ...

The Common offers plenty of space for musing on all the above, and more besides.