Not Closing the Circle

I'm not superstitious. Not really. I walk under ladders, and I don't avoid cracks on the pavement and those Fridays that come round with the number 13 attached to them don't bother me. OK, when I spill salt I always pick up a pinch of it and throw it over my left shoulder but that's a reflex thing. Honest.

 

But a funny thing happened during our last week in Australia. I know, you can't believe I never finished chronicling it, and I can't believe it either, and I guess after all this time what you haven't heard you won't be missing, but here's the thing that happened.

 

We were staying near my friend S, who I have visited every time I have visited Australia, bar once. There's a lot of water gone under the bridge since my first trip, but when I went that first time, she and her husband and her daughter picked me up at the local railway station and we went to a  pub for lunch and I had a steak sandwich.

 

This time, for the first time since that first occasion, we went back to that very same pub. Not with her husband, as he sadly died a few years ago, but her daughter was there just like before. And I looked at the menu and I thought, I'll have a steak sandwich. And then I thought, no, I can't have a steak sandwich because if I place the same order in the same place it will be like closing a circle and I'll never come back here again.

 

I don't know where this sudden attack of constraining atavism came from and it was remarkably odd. That said, since I have every intention of returning to see S and family for many years to come, I refrained from ordering a steak sandwich and had something else instead.

 

 

It was a fun lunch, much enlivened by S and daughter bickering over whether or not the daughter could keep a horse in her Mum's duck house. Happy Days!