David McMahon at Authorblog asks two questions for this week's weekend wandering:
If you got the chance to go back to your childhood, whom would you like to say thank you to?
Definitely to the lady who was standing by her garden gate as I aged seven or eight was walking home from school. She gave me a brandy-snap whose deliciousness I still remember. I can still see her vaguely in my mind's eye. And the brandy-snap.
When did you last write or receive a love letter?
That would be 1978, either to or from Heather, who ran off with another woman. Not surprising - a virgin at twenty, I was entirely incompetent sexually, and Gill was evidently not.
On the night of the Seduction, Gill's Mini broke down some where outside Oxford. I was sent out into the rain to find a phone box and call the RAC.
There was a camper van parked in the forecourt of a manor-housey hotel, and a woman who had taken an overdose of pills and was in an hysterical state, abandoned by her lover. It took me an hour or so to calm her down, and then the phone in the call box started to ring.
It was her lover, who kept calling me "my friend" in that vile lower-middle English manner, and thanking me for looking after her. I asked him why he had not helped, and he hung up. He was watching me from somewhere in the hotel. The lights were all out.
So back at last to the Mini, the windows thickly steamed up and...
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Readers: 1978???
Blogista: Yes, that is a little on the sad side.
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