The Ridgway

I've been walking along the Ridgway ever since - well, ever since I could walk.  This evening, there was a wild, stormy sky as another - yet another - band of rain moved in.  Of course, the shops have changed - the butchers used to be on the right hand side (why we didn't go to the one that was closer, I don't know), where our most frequent purchase was "a quarter of a pound of best mince" (that's ground beef, to American readers), which went straight into our cat.  The butcher who almost always served us was Mr Simmons, who had a medical condition that meant that he nodded his head all the time.  Most of the other kids called him Noddy (quite understandably), but I wouldn't do that, because my mother vehemently disapproved of Enid Blyton, and therefore I thought this was super-rude (which it was, of course, but not because of the Blyton connection).

But something's shifted in the last week. It's still home - or the road to home - and yet it's not. Day by day, I'm processing how my sense of belonging is shifting, and trying to work out why it should be that with my father no longer here, my relationship to Wimbledon as a whole, and the house and garden in particular, involves much more of a feeling than ever before that I'm living in the present than in the past.  Well, duh.  But it's a good, if unexpected sensation.

Must go and feed the foxes ... tonight, in Operation Clean Out Freezer, they will have one dish of Waitrose roast lamb and vegetables, and 12 M&S mini Yorkshire puddings with braised beef.