They ain’t even his, she thought. If they was his at least they’d be family. If they was his, at least they’d have good blood. But no.

They belonged to another man - common, bound to be - and some town girl. With skinny hips and a skinny waist.

“Lay with ‘em but don’t bring ‘em home. And whatever you do don’t marry ‘em!”

Ain’t she always told all her boys that. Ain’t she always done right by them, with no man and only the good book to guide her.

Remember the four year old who knew the cabinet like she knew her ABCs? The one who who wanted to visit the savanna when she was five - when her mother agreed it would be nice to see the elephant and caribou she giggled and told her: “Caribou live in the polar region, mommy”.

Well she just turned six and she’s into doctors. Not in a ‘watch me wear mommy’s stethoscope’ sort of way but in a ’sit in awe as I read gynecology books and discuss cell regeneration’ kind of way. She wants her mother to have another baby so she can see a cesarean performed. She’s requested it specifically.

She still likes Tinkerbell and Barbie and has a room full of pink-n-pretty. But there’s Beethoven playing in the background and gross anatomy texts by the CareBears.

He made his will this morning. The chief chattel - an aged violin. The children had been fighting over the worn out piece of wood since the winter his lungs closed up. When he thought he was gonna die and just about said so.

“I don’t want nothin else but daddy’s fiddle.” His daughter was a bossy, blue-eyed woman who liked to rest her chin on her chest when she spoke. “You can have all what’s left. But I want that fiddle!” She had a habit of sucking all the air from a room… just so she could blow it back out again.

“Now Lynnie, you know I’m the son.” His boy was blond before he was bald. Before he had two boys and a will of his own. “Go on and ask your preacher if it ain’t the sons who get the ‘heritance.” A loud laughing man who smiled and talked a lot and was just as light hearted as his sister wasn’t. “I’ll tell you what…if you’re real nice I might rent you some garden space for your beetroot.”

Neither of them were getting the fiddle.

He’d spent most his life staying out from between people and their arguing and he didn’t see why dying had to change it any. Nope. They’d both just have to do without. They wouldn’t like it. Not one bit. But the body who brought the stringed thing home from the Goodwill would.

The best advice I ever got came from my grandfather. A barefoot boy named Ramses who found God somewhere between the footwashers and the snake handlers and managed to keep Him in spite of it all.

Pa once told me, with all the conviction of a man who knows, what he didn’t know.

“I don’t know how God speaks to somebody else. I only know how he speaks to me. No Sir. There’s none of us knows what The Lord says to another. And as long as we don’t know, how can we say we do? How can I judge a fellow man when I ain’t no more than a man myself?”

jet lag: also jet·lag (jÄ•t’lăg’) n. - A temporary disruption of bodily rhythms caused by high-speed travel across several time zones typically in a jet aircraft marked by fatigue, insomnia, and irritability.

I don’t travel well with others. Especially when I can scream at them. I can scream at HIM. I try not to. And usually do a pretty good job with the trying. Until HE comes out with something like this:

“Why say four words when you can say a thousand? The mouth on you woman! Go on. It’s your job. Just get on with it!”

My job being the single handed unpacking of 125 kilograms of luggage which mostly belongs to him and which I also single handedly packed. HIS job, apparently, being driving to and from the airport after 21 hours in transit. Getting in at 1 a.m. Or six. Depending on which clock our bodies atune to. And in the process somehow managing to forget that I was stuck right there beside him through the whole thing.

HE’s since apologised in an as-it-should-be grovelling kind of way. And will be doing laundry, ironing and cooking in penance. He will also be cleaning the Louboutins that plug holed a garden at a country wedding earlier this month. He just doesn’t know it yet.

The old lady drug a fat sausage hand across her forehead, sunk deep into her comfy chair and sighed.

“Lawd knows Carl Dean. Lawd knows they prob’ly can’t help it. What with being born the way they was.”

She closed her eyes when she said it. Kept them closed just long enough to make everyone in the room wonder if she was ever going to open them again.

“Younguns born into sin like that…is naturally disposed to vile ways.”

I met this fellow the other week in a Chester graveyard. I was waiting on evening song at the cathedral and watching a bunch of teenage tourists when I wandered in and almost stepped on him. I’ve walked over a lot of Victorians in the past nine years but there’s just something about this one that made me stop and stare and clean him off a bit.

.

I’ve gained a stone this month. 14 pounds. 6.4 kilos. Whichever way you do it. This is just a rough estimate of course. I haven’t actually been on the scales. I value my state of mind too much. But I can feel it in my thighs and all over my face - because that’s where carbs go to die when you’re Buffy Holt.

I binge. Not on drink. On potatoes. When I was a kid my mother always bought those big plastic buckets filled with three shades of ice cream. The sister liked strawberry, the brother preferred chocolate and the little one slurped vanilla. Me, I liked steak fries with two cheeseburgers please. I started eating burgers in pairs with piles of chips when I was 2. My mother says it was because “You wanted them.”

And on that subject…last night I’m on the phone with very same mother. She starts whistling in the wind and then says “You know, I read somewhere that they’re going to start fining parents with obese children. Like it’s child abuse or something.”

Now, if you’re my sister you know this is my mother trying to get me to jump up and down about ‘How Outrageous!’ it all is so she can in turn throw out an “Aha! You see how I feel about smoking bans then!”

But, of course, I didn’t say ‘how outrageous’ I just said “Well, I wont go into what I think about THAT but if the government can take Celebrex off the market for causing heart problems it should be able to take carcinogen puff out of the restaurants for causing lung cancer.” She didn’t say anything but I heard her take a nice long draw.

I’m sooo gonna get a Chairman Mao button for my birthday.

The last time I saw her she had one child and wasn’t pregnant. Or maybe she was and I just didn’t know. Or maybe she told me and I just forgot because my life was in total upheaval and I’m really horrible like that. Anyway, she’s still not pregnant. But she does have an extra kid.

She and her scientist husband are moving to Madrid and she’s promised to take me into traffic and bring me closer to My Lord when we visit because driving in Madrid is apparently a very spiritual experience. You certainly pray a lot.

I don’t know why I even tried to debate motorway manners because really, the only thing remotely difficult about American traffic is the big-bus phenomenon and the way drivers simply cannot be made to indicate; and British roads I just refuse to deal with. I never get behind the wheel and, if possible, recline myself and wear a sleep mask when ever anyone else does.

For the past 6 months I’ve been totally into Dax Flame. Just so you know.