Beginning the Second Half of my Life

Spring has now passed to summer. The light feels all yellow, and though some leaves are still pale-green, the shadows underneath the trees are thick as pool water. The horizon is hazy, and the air tastes all sunburnt (not that it has been particularly hot or sunny) and makes me think of holidays in foreign countries.

Back to Worcester tomorrow. For the weekend. Feel strange, premonitory about this trip, which I didn't the last time I went to Worcester. I think it's because it's summer now (well in Stuart's world view anyway) and things seem more intense when seasons have just begun. Still, I talked to Joe today too. He'll be coming back to Worcester for the weekend too. He said that he feels quite strange about it, and that he didn't last time either.
Curious.

I was thinking, earlier on, why this time feels so charged, and it struck me that it feels like the second half of my life is about to begin. That would be strange wouldn't it? If exactly halfway through your life, you just knew. If this is the second half of my life about to begin, I wouldn't be too upset. Another 38 years would suit me fine. I'm sure my 76 year old self would want more though.

I hope there are some old ghosts in Worcester. I don't so much want to exorcise them as exercise them.
Some haunting somewhere.
Some reminder that I once lived there.

And this time, I absolutely will NOT lose my glasses.
And if I do, I won't be blaming pet dogs or poltergeists as I did last time...

(I have just thought of something. I remember on the last evening of being 17. Of watching the clock race up to adulthood in that haunted house on Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, and wondering what the first ever act of my adult life would be. Thinking about this for hours. At some point before midnight I put in a microwave curry (I know I know, this was 1990 though...) The microwave pinged, and I took the curry out to take upstairs to my room for the journey into adulthood -though why I thought a curry would be a suitably portentious beginning to adulthood is far beyond me- balancing on the plate; knife, fork, cup of tea, socks, slippy kitchen floor, clumsiness...
Well, the whole outcome of this was that the first act of adulthood was clearing a microwave curry up off the kitchen floor. Oh well...)