Padma gave me a thermos full of lemongrass & ginger tea and a playlunch - well, a packet of chocolate-coated diet biscuits, to be precise - and I took my memories and a memory stick to spend a peaceful day down by the river in far-away "Melbourne".
I suffer from what Immanuel Kant - always spoken of with his first name to avoid any ambiguity - called 'unsociable sociability' (ungesellige Geselligkeit) and I need my regular dose of solitude like others need their food and drink. Spending time away in far-away "Melbourne" in silent monologue with myself and my thoughts feeds my 'unsociable sociability', and I will spend more time there more often as the weather warms up.
What memories my solitude will throw up is always unpredictable but the memory stick I took along held a 90-minute BBC Radio dramatisation of "Heart of Darkness" - click here - which I had heard several times before.
It made the perfect background sound as I reclined on the daybed and, watching the thousands of flecks of dust dancing in the shafts of sunlight coming through the window, I drifted off to a long and satisfying nap.
May there be many, many, many more sunkissed days like this!
on "The horror! The horror!" of old age and gum boots and all that.
