I should preface today’s rambling with an assurance that any romantic suggestions that I make (or have made in the past) are not intended to land anywhere. They are just thrown out into the ether to wither and die.

Mrs Richmond, of course, has been bombarded with this sort of rubbish for years and has read or (worse) had to listen to it more times than any human should be expected to endure. And now she’s locked up in this house with me after decades of regular separation. The poor girl’s thoughts are wavering between suicidal and homicidal, but with a clearly stated preference for the latter.

I should also mention that these are not really today’s ramblings at all, but lifted, instead, from a brief conversation with a sunflower yesterday.

Isolation, it seems, is making me even lazier.

So first I just said hello to the Sunflower (Kate, to her friends), as we hadn’t spoken for a while, and I enquired as to her wellbeing during this troubling times. I said,

“Hey, Kate
Mate
How are you going?
Not throwing
The baby out
With the bathwater ?
I think we oughta
Shout
Hello
I’m still here
Don’t you know?
And feeling you near
Without fear
Of a future
Which would always be
When you and me
Would hold tight
Together in sorrow
But together still
For every tomorrow”

She responded with news that she was, in fact, doing fine and was, as is usual for her, looking for silver linings (or words to that effect) and that I might be best advised to look on the brighter side. “Look above,” she told me. This may have been a religious reference, but I doubt it.

So I did. Look above. But it didn’t help, a fact that I felt compelled to report back to her by saying,

“I look above
It’s dark and bleak
The stars they see me
Small and meek
I cannot fight
I cannot speak
I am human
Scared. And weak”

Realising that she may have triggered my paranoia she immediately assumed a more calming tone (the Sunflower goes under the name of Calm Kate, as well) suggesting now that I should ‘just drift like a feather’.

But I was too far gone. I couldn’t drift, or float or anything like that. I was anchored to the spot, still staring, as instructed, into the heavens….. and I saw someone up there …

“Look above? Look above??
When they look down on me?
I can’t even find
Quiet places to pee
These people. They’re watching
They won’t let me be
I’m trapped. Isolation
I’ve gone off my tree
There’s stuff that is happening
Misunderstood
I look East. I look West
It don’t look too good”

In a further attempt to put my mind at ease she assured me that I was not seeing things. It turns out, according to Kate, that there really were people up there in helicopters and the like, monitoring my every movement.

And she may have been right because this morning, I tell you no lie, the police did actually ring me ‘just to see how I was getting along’. That is not the sort of question that they have asked me in the past.

Odd.