2006-08-31
I’m off for a long weekend down south. My little niece (hey she’s twenty-five now!) is getting married in a picturesque little village in Kent. If you’ve ever seen the film ‘A Room with a View’ then you’ve seen the village I mean – a lot of the scenes were filmed there. It’s a tiny place full of sixteenth century houses. My brother-in-law grew up in one and while everyone thinks it must have been wonderful to live in something so ‘quaint’ and ‘historic’ he knows the reality was that they had a creaky old drafty place full of mice and spiders and which they weren’t allowed to modernise in any way because it actually belongs to a charity that preserves buildings in their original state.So – we’ll be staying with my brother Michael, who as I wrote last week is going through a wretched time mentally. I spoke to him Monday night and he was in despair at not making any progress and worrying about what’s going to happen to his marriage. I’ll need to get her perspective on it but he was talking about his wife being at the end of her tether with him and thinks she’s going to pack up and take the children and go back to her mother. The prospect of being alone with his mental torment scares him. But as I say – I’ll need to find out whether this is a thing she’s really considering (an eight week old baby would put additional strain on her after all, especially if he can’t do much to help), or whether it’s just a projection of his own mind. My parents know nothing about all this of course.
So what should be a happy and joyous occasion for us is going to be a bit over-shadowed. I just hope he feels able to make the ceremony and isn’t pitched into another panic attack. I’m convinced he needs some form of drug help if only on a temporary basis.
But then what do I really know.
I’m writing this ten minutes after Jo left. Apparently I was being a bit distant with her again this afternoon. She just phoned from her car (through a circuitous route that doesn’t disclose my number..) to check that we’re OK and she doesn’t have to worry all weekend about what it means. I explained I’d started in on thinking about Michael again. Sometimes I find it hard to remember I have any affect on anybody!