Thursday 8th September   

I keep forgetting things; where I put my keys, where I left my oyster card, if I had double locked the front door.  And so I have to now invent little routines for myself; I have a little china bowl which stands on a slim table just inside the front door, and here, whenever I come in, first thing I do is to religiously go through the pockets of whichever coat or jacket I am wearing, and my handbag, and remove keys, credit cards, travel card, mobile phone, and (a particular favourite, especially for when I am in the walking in the park) my mp3 player.  They all go into the bowl, so when I next leave the house I have them all to hand, rather than try to remember which coat I was wearing with which bag yesterday. And I have a little shutting-the-house routine, almost a mantra now, of closing the windows, turning the tap in the kitchen off, dimming any lights and with the key in my hand double-locking.  The point I am making is that I am getting older, and rather than rely on remembering these petty details, I now don’t have to think about them, they have become automatic. I do keep forgetting to buy milk though. In London it is quite rare to actually see a milk float nowadays, as almost everyone buys milk from the supermarket, or as I do from the little corner-shop, which never seems to close.  But I keep forgetting, and then go to make myself a nice cup of tea, and realising I have no milk.  Disaster – I cannot abide black tea, so it means going through the whole routine again, china bowl, double-locking and all, and out to return with my single purchase of a litre (whatever happened to pints) of semi-skimmed.  At last I can sit and relax with a nice pot of tea, a milk jug, maybe a fig roll or two, my trusty volume of Trollope under my arm, radio 3 quietly in the background and look forward to a pleasant evening all to myself again.  Yet even with all my creature comforts about me, I find more and more lately that I cannot settle, I keep reading and re-reading the same paragraph, and bored and listless, close the book. Then with nothing to distract me my thoughts keep returning to the memories of Grandma, and my father, and all of that Adrian nonsense.  And I had really thought that writing the wretched book would have buried all of that for good, some sort of exorcism, but I find that it has simply opened up another box of that tiresome girl Pandora’s.  Or like those wooden Russian dolls, when-ever you have successfully opened one up for inspection; there is always another lurking inside. And so I find that I wasn’t that successful at all, and I keep remembering things I hoped I had forgotten long ago.