It’s our lunchtime walk over the fields with Cedric. The weather has cooled down, after a hot few days, and Lizzie and I have resorted to wearing multiple jumpers (each) again.
Around us, in the fields, float the hundreds of mysterious white tubes planted by the Heart of England Trust – each containing a twig-like sapling. Looking at the myriad translucent tubes, it suddenly occurs to me that they look rather like the Hattifatteners in the Moomintroll stories… the diaphanous creatures with a collective consciousness and a strong electrical sting. I hope those tubes don’t start coming towards us, I think, irrationally.
Lizzie has been trying to plant flowers in one of the beds outside the house, but our middle-aged cat Rosie keeps on pooing in it and messing everything up. So Lizzie and I are both now carrying large slabs of ‘Bunton stone’ (they lie all over the fields) to add to the growing collection of them lying on top of the flower bed. Lizzie’s thinking is that a shield of cat-proof stones, over the flower bed, will stop all the shitting.
As we walk, lugging the slabs, we talk about this and that… mostly about Lizzie’s painting… but, eventually, the subject of my writing elbows its way into the conversation.
‘It feels like I’m getting nearer to finishing this journal I’ve been working on,’ I say to Lizzie, as I shift my big stone from one hand to the other.
‘What journal?’ replies Lizzie.
‘The one I’ve been writing! About everything which has been going on the last few months!’ I blurt, exasperated.
‘Oh, that one!’ says Lizzie, carelessly.
Does she really keep on forgetting about it? Or is she doing this just to wind me up? I wonder.
We continue walking.
‘Has there been less for you to write about, now that I’m getting better?’ asks Lizzie, perfectly reasonably.
‘Yes,’ I admit.
‘Hmmm,’ she says, then adds in a playful tone: ‘Do you want me to get ill again, so you have more to write about?’
‘No!’ I reply, aghast. ‘Of course not! That’s the last thing I want!’
‘How does the journal end?’ she now asks, then says, before I can answer, ‘Do I die? Do you actually kill me off at the end of your story? To make it more dramatic?’
‘No, you don’t die!’ I insist. ‘It’s a journal; I’ve not made up anything! It’s not fiction – like Love Story!’
‘I LOVE Love Story,’ says Lizzie, as she opens the gate from the field to the main road through Bunton.
Her dreamy expression suggests she’s now completely forgotten about my journal – again – and is now mentally fixating on the young Ryan O’Neal.
I’ve lost her, I think, as we tramp the last few steps home.
P. D. Clifton 
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