Day 3 Doing the Admin.

3rd August 2017

Spent the morning on the phone, cancelling insurances, arranging boiler maintenance, changing utilities, experiencing a selection of different call centres including Scotland.

I felt drained.

I had a dental appointment to have my crown fitted. A simple task, compared to the preparation. “How was your appointment with the hygienist ” he grinned “Hurt like hell” I replied. “Well this bit is easy, shouldn’t take long”

True to his word I was out in ten minutes. The really painful part was paying for it. The machine quickly sucked in my card. ” Gimme, gimme, gimme” seemed to be the sound it made, as it waited for my PIN. God that hurt, five hundred notes disappeared from my account, and all I had to show for it was a lump of porcelain and a bitter taste in my mouth. As I left the building, I thought to myself, “I wondered if they had a pentioners discount?”

In the afternoon I had arranged a meeting of some former school friends from the Bath Art School. I had arranged the meet at a local coffee shop in Bradford on Avon. I was there on the dot, waiting for people I hadn’t seen for over fifty years. A text came through “Where are you?” I replied and waited for a further message.

“We are here as instructed” I  looked around at the people sitting at tables. A motley collection of  walkers and day trippers that I hoped were not the ones I was expecting. Suddenly they burst in “We were in the wrong place” They giggled.

I hadn’t seen Carol and Glenda since our school days, but all that was forgotten in an instant as we talked about our personal journeys through life. Carol was the same energetic person I remembered, whilst Glenda the more reserved.

Whilst I was at school, I was a little intimidated by the girls and tended to shy away from any contact with them, so I was interested to hear what they remember about me. 

“You were really quiet” they both said “But that was a long time ago, we were all different then”

The conversations flowed, and we were later joined by Maggie and her husband, with another Pete being the last to arrive.

We had four hours of constant talking, and the unanimous agreement to do more, and often.

Physical exhausted, I drove back to the house, to recover.