Breakfast in the Bridge Inn was in front of a huge HD television screen showing us the Olympics opening ceremony from Paris – eventually I saw they had left the remote around so I turned it down. Two other couples came down for breakfast, one an older man in a bright orange Hawaiian shirt with a younger female partner. The food had the same slightly unhealthy feel to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I got up to Ludlow by a surprising and pleasant back route to pay my visit to J who lives in what I think used to be called a warden-controlled flat in a block. The street is steep but I could pull in and park the bike next to the big metal gates into the carpark of her block. Jane came out but wasn’t able to open the gates with her fob so I had to manoeuvre the bike to one side, grateful that it is relatively light. I wondered if there was a fault or whether she had the wrong item. In the end someone else let me in and gain I needed to park the bike in a narrow space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
J told me that she is very happy where she is living. She asked me about my family, then again a few minutes later and then a third time. I had a gradual realisation of her mental state. We went for lunch in a cafe next door, a lovely place but we arrived an hour earlier than she had booked. Because of the noise for much of the time we each read separate sections of the newspaper which she went out to buy. With flashes of some of her earlier character, she asked me some sharp questions about a book that I had written. I shouldn’t accept passively that the publisher is rubbish at publicity, she said. After lunch we went back and chatted for a while in her flat. I asked her what her plans were for her memoire which she had sent me a few years back in order to discuss publication. She seemed utterly surprised that she had written such a thing and asked me to send her a copy. Age and chronology became a little disturbing for me. First, she informed me that she would be 84 at her next birthday, not 90 as I had thought she had told me. Then she told me that she had moved into this accommodation 16 years ago. I was shocked to do the sums that revealed that she moved there when she was the same age that I am now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I prepared to leave, it was clear that J couldn’t open the gate so again another resident came and opened it as she beckoned me to get through before it closed. And after a quick goodbye I was off, turning right up the hill toward the town centre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the real holiday, perhaps, started with being on the bike, leaving Ludlow and heading north west towards the campsite I had booked in Trawnsfynydd<\/a>. I found the time with J quite upsetting, partly to see her own mental decline from her days as a sharp-minded academic and secondly how her age and faculties might map onto my own. So the cool air and sunshine of my ride was good to clear my head a little. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n