Michaelmas drift

Spotted outside the bank of Twisted Fix, one of Stroud's nightclubs. They're a bit blurry, because the wind would keep blowing!

My darling cat has decided that I need to get up at six every morning. He starts his offensive at about four, therefore, to give me time to wake up enough to get up and feed him. I fear his chip needs rewiring, as I never need get up at six, least of all on a Saturday! Today Steve got up first, when the indignant meowing began in earnest, some time after eight.

Steve went off to watch a steam train at Stroud station, and I lazed around. Heard the steam whistle from my kitchen and stood on a chair on the patio to see the train. The smoke trail hanging over the valley was lovely, but I've blipped the same spot a dozen times already.

Eventually I went down town. The heavy rain of earlier had given way to brilliant sunshine, but there was a sliver of winter in the wind. I could only just get away with not wearing a jacket. At the hairdressers, I found I could not get an appointment till 13th November. At Superdrug, I found no one knew if I could get an appointment for a flu jab on a Friday afternoon or not, or whether they do free diabetes testing. So I went to Boots, and found that I was eligible for diabetes risk assesment. Since my grandfather died of kidney failure and my mother now has the same condition, it's a no-brainer. (It's not that I'm feeling ill, just that I want to be pro-active with regard to diabetes. My mother was diagnosed in her fifties, but only when she tried out her younger sister's testing kit, and the blood sugar reading was right off the graph!)

So I gave up all thoughts of health and went and bought a new top instead, in late summer/autumn colours. Then I came home, and found I still haven't finished reading my book. It's Agatha Christie's autobiography, which I bought when I visited her house in South Devon two months ago. I was thoroughly enjoying her tales of travel, but hit a boulder when she expounded (by way of Miss Marple, etc) her theories on the treatment of criminals. Transportation was the best thing 'we' ever did with criminals, to her mind; and since that is/was no longer an option at the time of her writing, she proposed that criminals be forced to repay their debt to society by 'choosing between a suicide pill or offering' their body for clinical trials/experimental medicine. If they survived, they should be allowed to go free, and would have earned respect for themselves, and the community against which they had offended.

These memoirs were commenced in the 1950s, after the Nazi concentration camp experiments and twin studies had been made public. I admit I've gone off Agatha, in a big way (she also proposes execution as a quicker form of capital punishment) but am determined to finish the book, having come within 100 pages of the finishing line! I am not, and never was, a fan of her crime novels, but her writing (if you leave aside the opinions) is highly evocative of a bygone era, an age of more gracious living. It's interesting that she refers to 'the servant problem' and says that the scores of 'daily women' who do what servants used to do are valuable workers, but not as skilled as their forerunners. Now, not many people of my acquaintance even employ a cleaner or childcare, and if they do, it's certainly not on a daily basis!