Today is one of those September in November days. The sky is a deep blue and, after an early white frost, the sun is shining and the air is still. Although there is a bite to the day, in the sunshine it is quite warm. Tess and I soak up the sunshine on our lunchtime walk. Well, I soak up the sunshine more than she, as I spend a lot of time waiting for a tail sticking out of the hedgerow. Later on, as the sun is beginning to go down, we walk again with a friend and this time Tess "goes to earth" and we walk home without her. A quarter of an hour later she turns up having been rabbitting in the pasture - wet, muddy and pretty tired. This will not do, we tell her - she will have to go on the lead for a day or two to learn her lesson.
I have been re-reading Ronald Blythe's River Diary - a wonderful book to just dib into at odd moments. Reading one of the October entries he brings up a subject which sets me thinking. He remarks how often at parties or gatherings where there are people we don't know, someone will chat to you and say "And what do you do?" Blythe says how crudely people's lives are simplified by their being pigeonholed like this. We are all the sum of many parts, not just by the job we do - or did.
Up here in the country, I find that people are not particularly impressed by whatever job you might have done. They are much more interested in what kind of a person you are now. When I first moved up here in 1987, upon retirement from teaching, I don't think anyone ever asked what job I had done, and I certainly didn't tell anyone. This was my retirement - my teaching career was in the past - and I wanted to explore new avenues. Someone (a local) paid me a very backhanded compliment when they remarked that they knew we would settle well up here. When we asked how they knew - the astonishing answer was "well you don't wear posh clothes and you don't have posh furniture - people who come with those rarely stay long!"
I don't quite know what I would reply if anyone asked me that question today. Maybe I would say "farmer's wife", or "dog owner", but what I would really like to say would be something along the lines of "I don't DO anything, I just AM".
Lovely sunset here, golden sky, no breeze, Tess home and safe, the farmer just off for his walk round the fields - what more could anyone wish for. Have a nice evening.
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