Score Draws...

The week before last, for last week I was mostly penned in my home by a manic gunman, I took some time out to go and clear my late father's house.

For once and for all.

I asked for two days' annual leave due to me, and I arranged to be dropped off at my childhood home thirty miles away to fill my own boxes of memories (hopefully), and clear the remaining clutter and tat left behind by my dad's late partner's selfish adult children.

Do you remember me telling you, that they'd had four months to clear the place, when they had never even informed me of her death. And that I was having to pick my way through a real mess to try to locate anything of solely sentimental value to me that I wished to have with me forever...

In the meantime, I've been trying to get a grip, as you could probably tell! So, I tacked together my sad little heart with severeal glasses of sauvignon blanc and tout petits morceaux de chocolat noir, and braided my matted fur with flowers and pink silk hair-ribbons, to brace myself to 'do the deed'.

For once and for all.

First of all, I had to deal with a mountain of unanswered post. Some of it red bills, demanding attention from 'The Occupier'. Presumably that means the dust bunnies, for there is very little that remains in the house apart from cardboard boxes filled with her crap and matchsticks of furniture.

Anything of any value has been ripped away. Even the TV socket had been wrenched from the wall. There is no TV of course, but Auntie Beeb claims that I owe her a fortune for a licence, quand meme...

Thus, after an hour and a half of tears and torment dealing with the utilities companies, I was ready to work on what I had come here to do.

I developed a system, which meant that I felt safe to work in my dad's study at the top of the stairs, the box room. I had his little chair in there, his desk is gone, and some of his Aircraft books were still there too. Using it as a base, I brought the myriad of crumpled-newspaper filled boxes through to sit and sort.

After another half an hour, I'd finally found some family photos, and treated myself to a quarter of an hour of just looking at them, reminiscing...

I'd forgotten that many of these photographs even existed, it had been so long since I'd glimpsed them - My nan and some of her 11 sisters at Balmoral Castle, in front of a large bronze stag; My remaining great-aunts in their winter coats, in summer, standing to attention for the camera in front of a boarding house in Blackpool, maybe it was Scarborough; My dad and uncles, my mother's brothers still young in the Fifties, dressed and ready for Christmas wearing paper hats, pulling crackers and beaming broadly, in black and white for posterity.

A little layer of hurt peeled away from my stiffened body at last...

Finally I had found at last that there is something that remains, for me to treasure and hold to myself, my heart... These are the happiest of memories, that I can indeed take out and cherish at any time...

More to come, mes bloggy bon-bons. Please bear with me.

Fhina is in the Confessional Box. And she's finally stopped crying.

Art: Anne-Julie Aubrey, Blue field memories 15/100