Sunny afternoon...

So I’m sat in the porch in the shade on this very warm day in my shirtsleeves sipping a far too early cold beer. Luna is in the shade too, lushly comfortable in the ceramic chimenea that the fuchsia bush has grown right over and that she loves so much that we haven’t had the heart to cut back yet. The flowers will be pink when they come, long languid blooms that sparkle in the rain and that would almost be a weed if it wasn’t for the beauty of the flowers. A hover fly buzzes close in my ear, a dog barks somewhere down the road, a hot lazy bark that carries on the heat of this sunny afternoon and almost vanishes if I want to make it go away.

On the other side of the road and high up a builder is hammering the roof of another extension. A big house already; I guess it’s another en-suite in a place that probably already has three bathrooms. I’m not going to worry about it, not on this sunny afternoon where I have hover flies and beer and a cat sleeping in the shade. I’m not even going to give the woman who parks her car outside our house while she picks up her two daughters from the expensive private school up the road a disapproving look. She’s only been there a half an hour or so. Perhaps I’ll smile at her instead.

Young men with water bottles and phones to their ears walk up and down the road talking business. I know that it is business because they use words like ‘clearly’ and phrases like ‘I’ll get back to you before the end of play today’. I can hear the birds singing above their clear words and the smooth engines of the passing cars, about one every two minutes, taking a shortcut to avoid the traffic lights at the end of the road. It must save them all of a minute or so but they’ll be busy, busy, busy, rushing to pick the kids up from after-school club or to meet their wives so that they can pick up some pasta with Parmesan and rocket from Waitrose; pre-cooked of course. From indoors I can smell the aroma of our evening meal; slow-cooked pork and herb meatballs in a cider, mustard, and mushroom sauce. I’ll add the cream at the last minute and serve over a bed of ribbon pasta. I made it from scratch, from fresh ingredients, and that has to make me far holier than those Waitrose instant people doesn’t it?

It’s great sitting here with my beer, watching the world pass and waiting for the sun to get a little less warm so that I can sit on my bench instead of in the shade. All is well,  I’m enjoying the sun, looking forward to my meal and trying to be a cat with no thought of yesterday and no idea of tomorrow.

And that is all I want to think about today, and then I heard about Prince.