A rebel without a clue.

The final day with Ruby, the fifteenth, since I took over duties on that fateful Friday... but she's so lovely with every morning a cuddle, and a wriggling arse welcome into the day, but it's so long to be surrounded by only Wetherby and it's permanent fixtures. And I've hardly managed to reach the allotment this week as I don't like leaving Ruby alone for too long. It's not like Lola who always has my mother around to keep her happy? Yesterday we walked to Boston Spa via Thorp Arch village and Deepdale before coming back on the 174 and depositing Lola back with mum - where she went straight to the sofa after the obligatory bit of chicken... Quiet morning so far. Running the final bath and will begin organising my stuff back to mum's and clean up around the house prior to their arrival at midnight ... after an hour in meditation.

Up early this morning: just gone five. I think the storm has passed and I've paid my bills. Ruby had her breakfast and is alongside me. I've reduced the remaining tomatoes, which I had picked at the allotment, and fried a couple of pancakes, which will need finishing off in a little while, before I eat, clean up, go and get Lola, with Ruby, and do something together: rain dependent: Roundhay Park is a possibility?

As the clocks tick in the dining room/sitting room Ruby is snuggled up alongside me while we watch the gathering of the first autumn storm of 2023: Agnes with the trees behind the garden, on the Old Railway (Harland Way), bending their green crowned heads and soon they will shed all their leaves, as the horse chestnuts are already on Chestnut Avenue, and I contemplate a pilgrimage! 

Let's start again. A fine night's sleep and it's just Ruby and me this morning. The sky shows blue and there are other means at our disposal: the buses along Spofforth Hill can take us to a larger circus than Wetherby, which is clustered around such a small Market Place, that I can never ever see it as more than a large village... ... we went to my flat and then into Leeds, then Chapel Allerton and finally Harrogate before catching the 7 back to Rail Balk Lane and a hangover on Saturday. Then I did it on Sunday and again on Tuesday. I am killing myself really - but I can take flight to BDX on Friday evening and get walking along The Way once more. I am desperate to go and do something which makes me tic!

A hell of a lot of things are coming to a head. The end of something and the beginning of something. I know what is ending: dependancy on someone who hardly sees me as I am, but who I have been. Who misunderstands me completely, but who expects me to be at a beck and call without see I do shuttle back and forth for her needs. My mother. Let me tell you about my mother... I can't. I can't be bothered about her ways, her manipulations, her insults, her negativity. To have had an angry father and a manipulative mother...

Trying to get to the new beginning I am asking myself to start, as soon as I wake up to my self, why do I persist in putting it off until an obvious date? The moment is now. Now is all there is. Waiting for what ... a date; a line in the sand which, once stepped over, I can never return to? What has never worked and, although I push and push and push, never will. The mind keeps bringing me back to the stumble and I don't see it! The opportunity of being here and now up on Chestnut Avenue and not the sitting around waiting to not be on Chestnut Avenue, in another time and space, which I can never reach?