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Biddulph Grange, August 2022

My four-week period of volunteering ended with a tea break. Several people had checked to make sure I was leaving after the tea break, so I was pretty sure that some sort of celebration was planned. I arrived to find everybody I'd worked with or been connected with around a table containing crisps and snacks, and I was given a card from everyone and another from one particular person, and then they did this thing called 'rejoicing in merit', which is when somebody highlights nice things about you. These Buddhists really know how to put on a leaving do.

Since then I've been mulling over the differences between living and working in a Buddhist environment and what I'm like at home. Here at home I don't have much structure to my life, just a list of things needing to be done that constantly hangs over me. There at the retreat centre I worked during the day and had evenings to myself, lots of structure and no list. But without the list I feel I might become too disorganised and forget things that are actually quite important. Also, for about a week I've been having such trouble sleeping through the night, being wide awake in the small hours and then being too tired to get up early for meditation. So I'm not meditating, which I think makes me feel a little more unsteady.

Anyway, in the past week I've dealt with the backlog of emails, talked to the water engineer that visited mum and dad and taken a call from Thames Water about fixing the leak, looked into NHS Continuing Care (don't ask), scanned my teeth for the orthodontist, mowed the lawn, took 10 bags of garden waste to the tip, and took a camping chair to the local Repair Cafe where it was mended with glue rather than the rivets I had hoped for. 

With friends who visited over the weekend I went to a cracking gig featuring the Tom Robinson Band and The Undertones - all these musicians are older than us (Tom Robinson is 73!!) but with at least double the energy that we could muster. Next morning they (my friends not the bands) took it upon themselves to help repair one of my bar stools and the door to the hall, because both of these were demonstrating irritating defects that affected them personally. They declined however to address the issue of the door to the shower room - fixing that will take more than friendly goodwill, gaffer tape and a screwdriver.

With the friends gone I finally turned to house cleaning, only to find that the hoover was out of action (again, don't ask). What this meant was that all and more of the time I would have spent hoovering were spent on the Internet trying to work out how to either fix it or buy a new machine, and I think I've ended up doing both. Now there's just my Buddhism homework on the list above the tax return...