Rainy day pursuits

I realise that heading makes it look as if I've been sedately indoors all day doing something like a jigsaw. Nothing could be further from the truth - though yes, much of the day was indoors to avoid the sudden battering showers that made me for once feel totally unlike going out at all. Mind, I was out quite early (for me) in the morning, getting back to my Pilates class after a break of three weeks. Our teacher was working us hard because she felt she'd overindulged at the weekend, and I was stiff before I started, so by the time I tottered down the stairs from the studio I felt as if my limbs might just drop off if incautiously used.

I didn't stir for the next 90 minutes, but sat with my coffee doing Italian and then reading the Sunday paper. Himself staggered in from his class, and we had some toasted cheese for lunch (I really need to replenish my larder better). It was after that that we decided the day would be better spent fixing things, so that is what we did, jointly and severally (ie avoiding one another's spaces).

For my part, I tidied away all the bank statements, financial notifications, pension summaries and P60s that have been trickling onto a corner of the sideboard since my last purge at the start of the year, putting them all into the relevant folders or ring binders and into the filing cabinet. (I find all this a terrible bore - I'm hopeless at keeping things in order.) Then I tackled our bedroom. Think spiders, woodlice and the combination of the two; add some fluff and dust and plaster dust from under the skirting board onto the varnished floor and add a very unwilling housewife and you'll maybe have some idea of why this took quite a while. 

My photo, however, has nothing to do with dust or spiders. As part of the organising part of all this, I decided it would be sensible to have some record for my family of where I keep the potentially interesting letters and so on that have come my way during my life. This is the first of them: in the mid-80s I discovered the poetry of R.S.Thomas, the Welsh poet-priest. I'd only ever come across one of his farming poems - Cynddylan on a Tractor - because it was in an anthology when I was a young teacher in Glasgow, but in the 1980s I came across his religious poetry and was captured. In fact, I was so enthusiastic that I wrote him a fan letter and sent it to him c/o his publisher - and some time later, totally out of the blue, he replied, on a round-cornered postcard inside an envelope. I was overcome.

Years later, having read almost all his poetry and his autobiography, I contacted him again about something - and he wrote me a letter, on two sides of a sheet of paper this time, wondering how I felt now that Scotland had its own parliament. (He was a fervent Welsh nationalist). As he had a fearsome reputation, I felt honoured by his attention. Both letters are now photographed, as well as the originals put together in a sensible place (ie not with the chaos of my bank statements!)

So that was the day. A mix of physically demanding stuff and mental pleasure. But I'm sore all over this evening!