things

Had dinner tonight with a couple of very old friends indeed. It was sort of supposed to be an evening of new things - they're brothers, whom I'll call V and P (which aren't actually their initials, because I'm crafty like that), and their mum has just moved to a pretty new apartment by the water. So off we went this evening, with a box of chocolates and a poinsettia, and oohed and aahed at the new place, which has, among other things, a coffee grinder, a kitchen floor with actual, honest-to-god sparkles (it made me want to dance; my kitchen floor doesn't make me want to dance!), a large tank of tropical fish and a wee tortoiseshell kitty, who is very shy and lives in a cupboard.

But my point was, we got to reminiscing about long ago and far away, which reminded me of all sorts of things I'd forgotten about living in hospitals. I mostly did until I was twelve-going-on-thirteen, and V and P and I used to spent quite a bit of our time - basically, all of our time - running around getting in trouble. See, this was the late nineties when most of the small infirmaries became big district generals, and ours was no exception - it moved out of town to an enormous greenfield site complete with duckpond, and left behind eyes, gynae and geriatric psychiatry, to the amusement of all. And in the mess of the move no one really paid attention to the kids running around the place, and no one was exactly supervising - the logic was, doctors' children in hospitals are sort of supervised by osmosis, and besides if they break a leg, accident and emergency is right there - but even so, until V reminded me tonight, I'd forgotten we built a go-kart out of scrap wood and raced it around the hospital car park.

Seriously. Out of a three-legged table, some wheels taken off a trolley the porters had thrown out, some string and some enthusiastic pushers, including my dog, a fairly excitable Alsatian. Funny how you can forget brushes with certain death. We also built a treehouse at one point, and tried to spend the night in it; I think we lit a fire in a dustbin before giving up because it was cold. And went trick-or-treating through the hospital wards at Hallowe'en, and got songs played on the radio station, and walked out to the beach and tried to push toboggans down the dunes. It was all a bit Swallows and Amazons, only with less water and more sharps bins.

It makes me a little sad that now the infirmary really is closed, the buildings are going to be turned into flats, and the whole place is going to be different. The funny thing was, there were a lot of kids running around at the time, and I've forgotten most of them - but many years later I was at a party in Oxford when a girl came up to me and said, "The old infirmary...?" - and it sort of came flooding back.

Anyway, a lovely evening, surprisingly. In other news entirely, the week's lunatunes theme is "top five at the moment":

1. Florence and the Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) (with thanks to musesfool; she said she'd had it on repeat for a few days, and I nabbed it off her and now I've had it on repeat for days, too - it's so great, so full of energy);

2. Sarah Brightman - Nessun Dorma (so lovely, this, and usually thematically appropriate);

3. Amy Ray - Laramie (for Matthew Shephard, and I like it a lot, especially the first couple of lines: we hit snow on the road to Laramie / we all heard about that mess)

4. Regina Spektor - Eet (jacinthsong pointed me at this, and I don't understand it at all but it's really gorgeous)

5. Melissa Etheridge - Bring Me Some Water (I am not at all a fan of hers, but I really do like this song).


...tell me if you like 'em. Alas and alack, I return to writing my statement of purpose for Cornell.