Birmingham Good, Life Fair To Middling, Seeing Olivia Today

http://www.agracefuldeath.blogspot.com/ for information on the A Graceful Death Exhibition in London in Feb
http://www.antoniarolls.co.uk/ for my website
antonia.rolls1@btinternet.com to email me

Birmingham Good, Life Fair To Middling. Seeing Olivia Today

And having tea with my old English Teacher in his lovely cottage this afternoon.

I went to Birmingham for the day yesterday to talk over the A Graceful Death Exhibition going up there. All very positive, and I am very excited about it. When I said to my family that I had an important day in Birmingham and I had to be prepared and rested, it was a big step forward I am really going places blah blah blah my mother said Oh Good, You Can Drop Me Off At My Sisters Sheltered Housing Place. So Mother came too. My beautiful tiny elderly sparrow of an aunt lives in sheltered housing just five minutes from my Important Meeting. Over lunch a few days later with Mother and 19 Year Old Daughter, within the seven and a half minutes it took me to leave the kitchen and come back, Mother had invited Daughter too. "A Holiday!" they cried, "Let's go to Birmingham!" So my important business trip meant taking the family too. "You don't mind", they said to me with fire in their eyes and a fun itinerary evolving at lightening speed between them, "do you?" The wrong answer would have been Yes You Damned Relations, I Do! Take The Train Like The Rest Of Humanity, but I not only didn't say that, I didn't feel it either. I said Oh Good We'll Have Fun. And thought well, I would love to see Alan taking his son and brother on a business trip so they could have a knees up in a sheltered home with a teeny tiny sparrow of an aunt who is as beautiful as a china doll. Maybe he was never asked.

It was a good move in the end. Mother paid for our motorway food stops and knows Birmingham like the back of her hand. She probably saved the day by getting me there safely and without complications, and Daughter and Mother are like a Gang of Two, they are the same person despite the 60 year age difference. They were going to have fun Whatever.

Back now. Life Fair to Middling. Mustn't grumble. Got lunch at Oliva's today, always a good thing. She will make me feel good again. Then a walk across the hills and woods where she lives and back here in time to go for tea with a gracious and delightful friend in his cottage. He was my old English Teacher many centuries ago in my sixth form. He and his wife live a bike ride from here, and tea there is always a proper tea. China cups, buttered toasted teacakes, log fire and lots of talk on cricket. At midday today, I will willingly enter the storm of Olivia's life and times deep in the countryside and tell her everything that is in my mind and heart, and she will do the same. We will walk like D H Lawrence characters through the woods and hills around her home and gardens, feeling the earth beneath our feet and the trees standing tall and wild etc etc etc. I will then get into my car and go home and gently re enter earth's atmosphere and by the time I arrive at my tea appointment I will have undergone the equivalent of three months thereapy, an all night party and a walk through a howling gale in the moors. I will be calm (exhausted) and well behaved and very hungry.

So. Until midday now, I must do my Thing. Invites to get out, adverts to place, Birmingham to write up and expenses to claim. Meetings to plan people to call and all that jazz.

Before I go, I want you to look up a fantastic blog which I highly recommend. Go to http://www.mrssmithin2010.blogspot.com/ . I know Mrs Smith and she is very witty indeed. And she is a very very good artist so don't believe her if she tries to say she isn't. And she is not fat so don't believe that either.

Now. On with the show.