INparvo

140401 Tuesday: address coincidence

A dry weekend calm with sunny spells. The weather in 2014 seems even more important than ever before.

On Friday evening we took two friends and their neighbour, over the border, up the valley to the art film cinema in the sticks. It is in a modern secondary school, so a little quaint. For us there are closer multiplexes and art cinemas.

Weather permitting, it has been a winter Friday evening treat for several years.

If you are familiar with Monsieur Lazhar and its location you can imagine the deja vue we had when visiting the loo before returning home on the night we had seen that.

The film this time was another: Philomena, but that is not the point.

I had always assumed our extra lady passenger, sounding mildly rural, friend of the married couple, came from Suffolk, as did her husband. And me.

But no, it seems she came from Wiltshire. I tried to establish whether she knew the places my mother had taken me to as a child 70 odd years ago. But with no map at hand, squashed in the small car with three others...

Thus began a weekend of talking, me mostly, as is my wont, where I was to meet a distant relative, namely first wife of a nephew, a god-child, not seen for 22 years, separated from her husband, with a boy and a girl. This was on the first whole day.

On the second day, Sunday, they were was added to, by her older sister, her husband, and girl and smaller boy.

I gradually ran out of voice. By the Sunday evening, with the 3 older grown-ups remaining, my prominent proboscis had also turned into a dripping tap, long before I now write this.

The first wife and I have art in common. Whereas I was forced to go to church as long as I can remember until teen-age, she has had a life in religious -at least-spiritual activity.

She was talking to establish where we lived. She spoke in a little detail of a quiet serious man she knew and, with vagueness of unfamiliar distant landmarks used the familiar vague phrase: he lives your way somewhere.

She then looked up the address, which in part, had a similar address to us but not the same post code.

Tonight we walked a post prandial up the lane to see if we could find the vaguely familiar house nameplate..

We did. It is very tonally similar to its brick surround AND right opposite our exit from the lane. In 25 years our exiting took 100% attention.

With the hill-start, by bike or car there was enough never to notice the name.

Back to art .

Almost inevitably I was to find I had made marks on supports i.e paintings or drawings on whatever, showing where the house was suggested through trees.

Maybe he has spent more time looking at us.

Now with our four eyes peering in the gloom he suddenly seemed to appear.

We continued a circuit.

I wondered, was he thinking, must have been a bird ?