The picture is of the lovely burnt sugar trees, they are the yellowing ones. I took it on the dog-emptying exercise in the Library Gardens this morning. Their gorgeous falling leaf scent is starting to drift everywhere, sweet and acid and autumn, it slows me down just to stop and breathe for a while every time I pass them.
We are still having what is a sort of cooler version of an Indian summer, not quite warm enough to go outside without a couple of jerseys but pleasant all the same, I hope it lasts until December and then turns into snow in time for Christmas.
I don’t really have much to tell you about today, because it is Saturday and so the usual pattern of sleep and work has settled in.
It was lovely to sleep in the newly-made bed last night. It turned out to be just for a very short while. Mark cut his finger this morning, and spattered blood spots on it and we had a very narrow escape when Roger Poopy decided to be sick and was hoofed off downstairs and out of the back door just in time. I hadn’t really expected that it would stay pristine for very long, and so enjoyed the moment whilst it lasted, and very smugly splendid it was.
We all sat in bed over coffee for a while this morning, mulling over last night’s customers. Number Two Daughter had had a group of eight city of London fund managers in her taxi and had been surprised by how very quickly her feelings about them changed from impecunious envy to horrified pity. They all had a very great deal of cash, which is always a nice thing, but none of them seemed to be enjoying their lives in the least.
I am not in any way at all a subscriber to the ridiculous belief that money doesn’t buy happiness. Some of my very happiest moments have been brought about by having unexpected sums of surprise money, what a relief it can be. Money might not buy happiness, but it does pay the electricity bill and it is much easier to be happy when the lights are on.
Despite sharing this conviction, nevertheless Number Two Daughter was appalled by her small insight into their lives, in which employer and employment controlled every waking thought, and obedience to corporate acceptability was everything.
At the end of their rather long and very conversational journey, when she deposited them at the site of their Team Building weekend, she came away with a new sense of her own independent freedom.
She said that they approached their lives by wondering what they could afford to do, instead of working out what they wanted to do and then trying to find a way to afford it.
One of them said that he didn’t especially mind working late, sometimes in the office until midnight, because he hadn’t got anything else to do anyway.
We all thought about this in surprise, imagine having lots of money but nothing particular that you wanted to do. We have all got lots of things that we would prefer to do rather than go to work, which is probably, we thought, why we are always so broke.
We made picnics and trudged off out to work for this very reason: but it isn’t bad at all really. We don’t have to be nice to anybody or be afraid of anything, we don’t have targets or deadlines or meetings or team building exercises.
A bit more cash would be handy, though.
Winter is coming.
