It’s funny how we think we know the people we think we know. Until we find out we don’t. Then we’re surprised, but not really because we sort of suspected it all along. That we didn’t know them as well as we thought we did. Or at all.

It makes us sad. Then it makes us think. About the faces we wear. The different people we are to the different people we know. About the honesty of it all. And the psychology behind it.

We’re all schizo. In our own completely sane and socially acceptable way.

“Fiction begins where human knowledge begins. With the senses.”

- Flannery O’Connor

We, Steph and I, climbed out at Bridge Street and ducked into a Tesco Express for paracetamol and hand sanitizer. Hoping they had a loo too. They didn’t. But they did have the bulk standard Meal Deal which we lunched on in the Square – a little patch of grass near Parliament which, it should be noted, is essentially just a gigantic roundabout you risk life and limb to reach.

We also decided to do a walk through Westminster Abbey that day. I had never been inside before. Partly because I never had the time. Mostly because I refused to pay £12 to enter a church even if it did have the bones of Chaucer.

Then I remembered how The Canterbury Tales totally and absolutely changed my life as a teenager and made me want, more than anything, to be a writer and a teller of tales. Even though it took fifteen years and The Euro’s constant admonition to get out of that job and do what you love before I really set my mind to saying I will.

There’s also that whole Geoffrey/John of Gaunt connection and the absolute stunnery that’s the inside of the Abbey itself. You cannot, by the way, take photos from within the Church. But you can snap away at it’s exterior and at Westminster…Parliament itself. And its crowning glory. That big ole – but not as big as you probably think – clock tower that sits atop it. Ben.

Plez Hubbard died last week. That wont mean a thing to you. Unless you live on the mountain…or use to. My mom called and said ‘they found him in his car’ and that someone had made out he’d been there for a while.

But he hadn’t. His obituary showed up too soon for that.

I’m not sure what sort of man he was. I knew him well when I was a kid, saw him just about every day of my life back then. But I never paid much attention to him after I grew up. And it takes growing up to really look at a person sometimes. I never did that.

Plez wore overalls. Drove a tractor. Worked in a cemetery. He hung pigs from trees to drain in old cast iron bath tubs. Our dog got hold of a hog’s head Plez had sawed off once. Carried it around our yard for days. My mom went crazy.

Plez never aged. He always looked 80 even though he never lived to see it.

When I look back at my time on the mountain, all those years I spent pining for somewhere else, thinking I don’t belong in a holler on a hillside, when that was exactly where I belonged because there’s always a purpose to our place, Plez is one of the defining images.

Plez Robinson Hubbard. Dead at 78.

Boy, what a name.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

I don’t know about you, but the opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis colours my view of the entire book. Whenever someone asks me to review it or just ‘tell me what you think about it’, it’s the only thing that comes to mind.

I’m not frightened by the beasts, exactly, but I find buggy creatures so grotesque and horrifying, I simply can’t move past this.

I tried again last night and…nope. The visualisation of Gregor as an insect refuses to leave me long enough to allow any sort of real digestion or enjoyment of the creative or thematic elements of the novel.

Sorry.

My grandmother tells me I look like my mother. And when I put on her old flannel shirt circa 1975…

She laughs, “It’s enough to confuse anyone!”

Pity I didn’t get the washboard abs she liked to sport, even at six months pregnant (I do not lie), or her Nefertiti neck. But I did get her hair. And I suppose that’s something.