Perfect Day

This morning I tried to sleep in, honestly I did, I mean I gritted my teeth in spite of my silly smile, and forced myself to luxuriate a little longer, but in the end I was just too excited.

I think I first woke at 4am.
Again at 5.30 , fifteen minutes before the alarm habitually goes off.
I was in that sunny, half giggly 'going to get up any minute' frame of mind by the time the music started and that allowed me to float through a whole hour of Radio 2, before the alarm switched to the 'last warning beeps' in the middle of a really quite interesting bit.
Even that couldn't dampen my mood.

At 9.30 this morning, after checking emails, catching up on Facebook and answering a few requests for advice on the Homeworking Forum (je suis Millysoo, un forum specialist, for my sins); I set off for town and spent nearly an hour with Paddy Range, the presenter of the Breakfast Show at Seahaven FM.

I was allowed to touch the buttons - to call up items using the music software, to drag and drop the jingles etc etc. I was allowed to sit in the big chair.

I realised just how much I'd absorbed from watching Tony Vanburger (thank you, Tony).

I realised its not actually that scary, or hard.

Afterward, I floated out of this pretty seaside town, through the one main road of shops, past the little war memorial with its perfectly coiffed lawn and immaculate flower beds and up the steepest hill, to my 'proper' work. I even got there early.

Sigh. Soooo happy.

On the way up that hill, past the pond and on into Millionaires Row where the smallest, most modest and unadapted properties have five bedrooms and a mere acre for a back yard, I saw a woodpecker.

I saw a woodpecker; my first ever, clear as day, as-near-as-a-streetlight woodpecker, half way up a tall, ancient, dead looking trunk, nestled safely in the middle of an otherwise sturdy, large and healthy tree.

It took me a moment to notice the perfectly circular holes, and another to realise that from one of those emanated the raucous, hungry complaints of a very boisterous, demanding and obviously thriving offspring.

I couldnt work out where, precisely, and mother made an ostentatious, langourous but flourishing exit around the foliage in, I presume, a bid to draw me away. I did the decent thing and walked on. The young squawked impatiently, regardless.

By this point in time it might assist the narrative for you to be absolutely certain that the childish delight I had worn thus far like a slightly goofy halo, was from that point on a solid, fixed grin on high beam, plastered right across my face.

I don't care who saw. I was tempted to engage a solitary gardener under false pretences, even when he was so deep in thought and rosemary alike, then a few doors down, to tap on the window of a van where a lone builder was enjoying deep thought and a sandwich.

I restrained myself; I know not how. Possibly by skipping slightly more than might be considered sane, if you were to see such an action performed by an overweight, middle-aged English woman in the tipping English rain.

It was, after all, all very, ... English.