Moving On

The friend of a friend from Kuala Lumpur who was mentioned in January bid an affectionate farewell this morning. He’s been a great asset, on the one hand, a round, jolly little bloke who takes life as he finds it, so not domestically hard work, on the other, very intelligent and a good conversationalist, so not boring either. It is, though, a different world; having landed here from KL in order to work in Oldmeldrum, he’s been living with us for a couple of months; but he’s now going to take switch roles to being a kind of troubleshooter moving between several sites between Yorkshire and the Clyde Basin. He obviously enjoys what he does, enjoys being good at it, and finds it all very interesting, but it’s very alien from our perspective. Admittedly, once there are 4,000 books and 100 paintings in your life, living out of a suitcase ceases to be an option, but even if the practical difficulties didn’t loom so large,  I think I’d find living like that terribly stressful. Anyway, good for him, and we’ll hope to see him again once in a while.

On another tack, we had a Historic Moment this morning. Twenty-four years ago, the Professor and I got married. His Spanish aunt sent a message which caused, at the time and subsequently, a certain amount of hilarity: ‘I will give you the family silver coffee pot. But you must understand, the postage is ruinous, and I am very poor now. Imagine, when I last went to the bank, I was forced to fly economy class to Geneva. So you must pick it up when you are next in Malaga’. Well, strange as it may seem, twenty-four years have gone by without any sort of pressing reason to visit Malaga. But the silly old thing died last year, and the Professor’s saintlike cousins have been sorting out the orts and leavings, and it turned out the coffee pot did still actually exist, and they brought it back with them … so after three days of getting it clean, he made coffee in it this morning. I don’t suppose it had been used in decades. So there’s a sort of small satisfaction about it all – nobody really needs a silver coffee pot but there is such an element of waste, loss and futility in the story of the Spanish aunt, sitting behind shut shutters decade after decade, feeling sorry for herself, it’s quite nice to have salvaged the thing as a memorial of the more dynamic phase of the family history.