Monday 24th August

It's the school holidays
and I'm keeping a daily diary
like we used to do in class
as a warm-up while
the teacher did Admin:
reading notes from parents,
taking dinner money, bank money,
calling the register ...
I must have enjoyed it.
Probably the only child who did.

Now, in 2020, it seems
a 1964 calendar would work this year:
Monday the twenty-fourth of August
is a Monday this year, too.
We were taught to write that as
Monday 24th August - not to write
the 'of' and the 'the' - but,
when reading aloud, to insert them.
Children don't learn that any more,
so I write it in full.

And what do I learn from my diary?
My mother's second cousin,
to whom she was very close,
never changed her hairstyle.
Seems they had a garden with
a wrought-iron gate.
Foyles bookshop, I remember,
was the biggest in the world.
I never did finish Prince Caspian,
but I did reread, again and again,
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

© Celia Warren 2020

Note: Reading this diary entry, and noticing my precision over times, I'm wondering if my father perhaps had hoped to be on the road by, say, 8.30am? It wouldn't surprise me. As for me, that day I had a late night.