A Short Walk from Harrods

Chapter 1
Sitting here, as presently I am, the nicotiana is higher than my head. Well. As high as. The scent is overwhelming, drifting out into the still evening air. I suppose that I should try and find a word other than ‘drifting’. But that is exactly what scents do on still summer evenings; it’s what this scent is doing. So it remains. Drifting. It’s all part of building up an illusion of peace and calm. I planted the things out in April, earlier than advised, but I did it anyway, and did it so that I should be able to sit one evening quite embowered by blossom and suffocated by heavy scent.
And so I am.
A sort of peace descends. It would appear, from all outward signs, that stress has faded.
Only ‘appear’. I still jump like a loon if a book falls, a door bangs, the telephone rings. That’s rare. Rarer than falling books or banging doors. The telephone hardly ever rings. And never between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon.
People go away.
Sometimes, on Sundays, if it gets really grim, I walk to the station to buy a newspaper I don’t need, or want, and talk to the very friendly chap who runs the paper stall. His mate runs the flower stall. We speak of the weather, local football (about which I know nothing, but I nod and listen), and it breaks the silence.
Heigh ho. A fat bee nudges rather hopelessly among the fluted white trumpets. If you could talk to a ruddy bee I’d tell it that it was out of luck. You won’t get any pollen from that lot, the trumpet is far too narrow.
But it’s not after pollen. Nectar. That’s the word. And it won’t get that either. A hopeless, fruitless search.
Talking aloud to oneself, or trying to engage a bee in conversation, or discuss the state of the day with a portrait, or the wallpaper, is an almost certain sign of incipient madness and, or, senility.
I don’t honestly feel that I have reached either of those stations of the cross; but I have checked it out with others who live alone and living alone, they assure me, gets you chatting up a storm.