Therapy

The visits of friends are therapy. I love having visitors, but I love it more when my visitors are close and dear friends. I love cooking and making them comfortable, I love the company on trips out and fun activities. I love talking about things that matter most to us.

I love it when they come up to me and say, "you look tired, shall I make you a cocktail?"

Then when friends go home, you have to find your own therapy. I always hover on the brink of feeling down when visitors leave. There's a moment of, "wheee! I can do what I want!" but that soon passes and I feel down and lonely.

Today, my post-friends-visiting therapy is to think back on the things we did, and to bake salami bread with caramelised onion and cheddar.

We:-

1) Used up a small portion of our lives getting lost in the most extensive second-hand bookshop I've ever visited. Three separate staircases, uncountable rooms, stacks and shelves and cabinets of books, including The Locked Room. The three-hundred year-old half bookshop owner, half gnome presiding over the book orders, and the towering mahogany bookcases that change positions when you turn your back.

Okay, so the gnome and the moving bookcases may be exageration, but only just.

2) Drank margaritas.

This needs no further explanation.

3) Created a dessert carousel. Think a selection of desserts and puddings including a homemade meringue, a lemon and ginger cheesecake and something called Stairway to Heaven. Imagine said selection mounted on a turntable, and three dessert-deprived women armed with spoons....

4) Walked around Buttermere. Imagine pastoral beauty, a spiritually cleansing experience of heritage and landscape, enriched by the scent of water and the breath of the sweet wind.... imagine calling a previously unnamed waterfall, "goldenballs" and posing an illustrative photograph in front of it.

5) Went out for dinner. The sort of chinese food that induces involuntary groaning among its consumers.

6) Talked. Writing, food, men, drinks, health.

7) Played with cats. Which is obligatory among my guests.

Later, my therapy will be thinking back on these things, and eating salami bread with caramelised onion and cheddar.