It's the twelfth day of Christmas today and I feel like celebrating but it feels wrong without her.
When you've just lost someone you take ages to do things. I've just taken nearly three days to tax the car, get the insurance and MOT straight and do the vehicle registration. There was then a hair-raising trip along a freezing Thames to get the tax disc from the DVLA before it closed. Then the journey back on the bus across a ghostly and dark Putney Heath - spooky. In deep winter, whilst all of Nature slumbers, i run about like a mad thing.
I didn't get back to the MOT garage until late and it was closed. Have to go and get the car tomorrow.
It's weird: I don't feel I love anyone today. It's a numb feeling.
That car was her. Every time I look at it, its red paint and small nose poking out, sandwiched between other cars parked in the road, I think of her. It's why I decided to keep it. When the probate solicitor asked its worth and I told him the year it was bought, he actually sniggered and said "Well I don't think that will add much to her net worth!" I gasped. it was like being flicked by a cold wet towel across the face. Not only that, the other people in the room laughed too. All except me. What was funny about that? He went on: " You'd be lucky to get £200 for it!" Maybe so Mr Uriah Heep, maybe so. But it was her car, it was her life, she loved it, she spend a big chunk of her life in that car. And now, Mr Heep, it appears to be mine. Now there's a thing! What would Charles Dickens think?
I can hear the fox's bark in the deep bleak dark outside. We have a lot of foxes as it is near the riverbank. He is scavenging. Maybe he and the solicitor have a lot in common. Didn't Uriah Heep in David Copperfield have a brush of red hair too?
Which Dickens character am I , I wonder. Estella? Miss Haversham? Neither i think, I am probably more like some character out of Vanity Fair. In some ways, William Thackeray had a sharper eye for people's real nature than Dickens. I love reading him. I hadn't read much until Christmas, when I picked up a biography of Socrates that has just come out. Socrates was tried by his fellow citizens of Athens for being amongst other things a bad influence on young people. There are probably a number of people answering to that description today. Sometimes I feel as though both Mum and I are on trial having to answer for the decisions we both have made in life.
It is so strange sometimes, that I feel like a criminal when I go to the solicitor's office and read the nasty letters from my step-brother's solicitor. It's as if I am constantly having to prove myself not guilty, not a liar, not a thief and believe me I've been accused of it all since she died. It's as if I'm in the dock. And i'm the co-executor of the will! And old Uriah Heep sits there and watches it all with a smile on his face, and takes his fee. Some things haven't changed since Dickens' time eh?
Hope it won't be too much of an effort to go and get the car tomorrow.
Night night.
Perse.
