Not yet up to fielding a new subject, I have plundered my backlist and, thanks to Erik Lomen, a mushroom-farmer in Maine, who has embarked on a full-scale biography of my erstwhile lodger George Andrews, I now know a lot more about George than I did before.
For instance, though I did know that he had a wife, from that one glimpse of her (this link will take you to my original blog post in August 2024 which mentions her) I had no idea that he also had five children . . .
Exactly where they all were during the two years their father was living in my garden shed is not altogether clear.
What is clear, for Erik recently spent a month with them, is that they are alive and well and living in France. Indeed from the photographs he has just sent me of them, now in their mid-fifties, they are in great shape: model french citizens with fond and voluminous memories of their parents.
When I remember how embarassed I could be by my own conventional parents: the way my father just shouted louder if someone didn’t understand English or when, a little ahead of the game, my mother adopted the New Look, I feel ashamed.
What if my mother had looked like this . . .
Or my father like this . . .
“The lineaments of gratified desire . . .”
Photo by Jakob Pfalz on Unsplash