There is a room in Burnbrae, I cannot walk past without defferentially averting my gaze, tip toeing as silently past as my clumsy frame will allow.
When I was very young, I lived with my Grandparents for a time. That was the time when little children were seen and not heard, when beds were very tall and rooms dark and mysterious.
Last night it dawned on me that my strange behaviour was something embedded deep in my subconscious. I daren't peek within, lest my grandmother, at her most ferocious would catch me and wreak here vengeance. It's extraordinary but very real and it's taken me years to work out why I creep past that doorway, barely ajar, even though I'm fully aware that it has no occupant, and she has been gone for four decades.
I managed to get as far as the doorway today, even opening it a little, but I am yet to set a foot in the room, not because of fear or superstition I hasten to add. Just because.
From that doorway I can clearly detect the smell of a large chamber pot in need of emptying and the clop of the milkman's horse up Norman Avenue, a thousand kilometres and half a century away.
Enough of that nonesense though. We've somehow thus far managed to forgo our ramble round the yard, but I'm sure we'll manage that in the morning. Another drive in the country, egg and bacon pie (or is that quiche?), chocolate cake with butter icing, mountain air, a couple of lakes, evening haze.... sigh.
Tired but happy again!
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