I discovered late last night to my distress that I had left my lovely Bluebell perfume in the locker at the Loveliness Holistic BodyBeautiful Health Spa after our swim. It was a full bottle, and I was horrified to realise that I had lost it.
There is a taxi rank just outside the hotel which houses the spa, and when we had a quiet few minutes I dashed into the hotel. It was midnight, and the porter was just locking the front door, but he very kindly let me in and opened the spa for me, and we had a hunt for it together, but to no avail, and I went to bed feeling upset with myself for my carelessness and sorry that it was gone.
I rang them anyway when I woke up this morning, and to my delight Mike, who is the manager, called me back two minutes later to tell me that Coral, the very chatty Spanish cleaner, had found it and locked it in the cupboard for safety, and so I didn’t need to worry about it and could pick it up during work today. I was so pleased, it is lovely when you think that something is lost for ever, and then find that it isn’t.
It was quite a bright day. All the mist had lifted, and when we took the dog to be emptied the morning was absolutely full of birdsong. I love hearing the blackbirds, listening to them singing at this time of year is one of the great pleasures in life.
We watched one in the Library Gardens this morning. It had caught a worm and was eating it, tearing pieces off it with its razor-sharp beak, whilst the poor worm writhed frantically in its dreadful death agony. It made me sad to see it, and to remember what a beautiful and terrible place the world is, and how extraordinarily fortunate we are not to have been born as the sort of creature that might just get eaten at the end. It is a great thing to have been born a person.
After the dog-emptying in the Library Gardens I collected all my library books and took them back, and to my satisfaction I found four or five books that I hadn’t already read amongst the shelves of historical romances, crime fiction and celebrity memoirs, and that I liked the look of. This is an enormous bonus, sometimes I can wander round despondently for ages trying to find almost anything that looks promising, and then having a dreary week reading drivel.
Included in this lot was a Discworld novel that I hadn’t read, which was quite pleasing because it is easy and entertaining reading for the taxi rank, and also a book about the way the brain grows and develops as we go through life, which looks very interesting and will stand me in good stead if ever I decide to stop driving taxis and retrain as a brain surgeon, a bit of background knowledge is always handy.
Mark has picked up a broken power washer from the farm and spent his morning trying to repair it so that we can wash the taxis with something a bit more squirty than the watering can, which will be ace, he thinks he can get it working, and I am sure that he can, as he can get pretty much everything working if he puts his mind to it, and for a person who can mend broken oil rigs, presumably a broken squirting machine shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.
We occupied ourselves in this gentle pottering about sort of way all morning, and then had a sleep before it was time to go to work, because of course it is Saturday, and a busy time for taxis until almost Sunday breakfast time.
I didn’t at all want to get up and go to work when the alarm went off, even though I wasn’t really sleepy any more, but when I pulled together some proper self discipline and got on with it, it wasn’t at all bad. The skies cleared, and the trees are coming so beautifully into leaf that I could hardly concentrate on the road for looking at them, it is such a relief to see the colour seeping through and knowing that the dark grey of winter is over again: and it is almost Maytime, and the bluebells are coming out.
I have got lots of these in the garden, white ones as well as blue, and in a week or so their fragrance will be the first thing you notice as you come through the back gateway. In some places here there are so many of them, in great cloudy drifts in the woods, that their perfume floats in through your car windows when you drive down the road.
It is one of my favourite scents, which is why when I found out that you could buy it in a bottle I was so very pleased, and it really is very bluebell-like.
And now I have got it back.
