Rivers and Roads

When I turned towards the kettle, he moved behind me and gave me a huge hug.

'I'm sorry you're ill, Sis. Please don't die.'

And that, after all, is what it was all for. You don't fool me Bro, with your horrible humour and your claims that you only came because your partner insisted. This is what your disaster riddled journey up the country was about. Thank you.

I leaned my head against his arms, just for once not having to be the unbreakable monster of our childhood, and told him I have no intention of dying, that everything is going to be all right.

Then the rest of the night was spent talking about many things, but mostly his new love; he has never visited the peak district before and is now besotted with Glossop. It is a very beautiful part of England certainly; for him the joy was in all these little burns and springs and rivers bubbling up and rushing out across the land.

'I've never seen so much green, emerald green, grass and leaves and,' he said, 'and rivers that actually run away from you, bursting and waving! I didn't realise how affected I was by the canal in Devizes.'

They've done a lot to the canal since we lived there. Yes, the Caen Hill locks were marvels of engineering but to me the result just looked like sad locked up ponds.
Things have changed a lot, the canal has been cared for. Now it's a place of barges and dragonflies, lilies on the water, voles on the banks, but I know what Bro means. His heart is full of the beauty of water untrammelled and playful by green hills and old stone walls, his eyes actually sparkling as he described it. I have never known him like this about any place ever, and appreciate him leaving his new love to come see me. I will be encouraging him to visit the peaks more often, see if Matlock and Buxton and Bakewell can please him as much as lovely old Glossop. They're going to get a campervan at some point when their poor old banger finally surrenders, but for now, 'it's one of the oldest cars in the borough,' Bro's partner explains. Somehow its age either discounts or exempts it from the deeply unpopular ULEZ charges around London. And though I have sympathy for Sadiq Khan, from what I hear that car has more chance of getting through 2024 than he does.