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Cornwall
23 July 2004
Well, that was a week. Since we last spoke, I have inter alia married two friends of mine in a castle, been to my old friend Lel's second funeral and - shock, horror! - visited my mother.
I'm sure I've spoken of all this before, except perhaps my mother; but my friends Jeremy and Apryl got married in a hurry (no, no, not what you're thinking, not a shotgun in sight) and wanted to have a proper ceremony later. So they hired a local castle (a little mediaeval, and a hell of a lot of High Victorian Gothick: I so want that castle...) and told everyone to come in period costume. They asked me to play vicar, and dressed me up in cassock and clerical bands; wrote their own service - complete with thunder and rain on the soundtrack - and we did it all solemn in the chapel. Then to the great hall for food and frolics, and it was a fine day and we were all very happy.
Next day I left home at seven in the morning and stepped out of a taxi at the other end of the country at two minutes to five, for a five o'clock solemn mass to inter Lellie's ashes. My teeth have seldom felt so skinned, but I had to be there, having missed her and her dying and her proper funeral also. I stayed a couple of nights with Jay, whose house she shared, and then went a little further downcountry (this is all Cornwall, for you atlas-hounds: Liskeard and Lower Sticker) to see Mum and my kid sister's family, including the splendid 17-year-old who is doing just what 17-year-olds should do, playing in a punk band and all.
And so home, to find another window broken by another stone. I don't think this is malice, particularly; malice breaks the big windows at the front of the house, and this is just little ones at the back where stones can be thrown from the alley. But it makes me malicious: nervous and angry at the same time, and that ain't good.
Today I signed four hundred sheets of paper, to go in the limited editon of Juliet McKenna's Turns and Chances, which I wrote the introduction for. You get to do odd things sometimes as a writer, they're just not very excitingly odd...
© Chaz Brenchley 2004
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.