MS. JUDITH ANN AYCOCK herald-dispatch.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from herald-dispatch.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Fri 5 Mar 2021 05.00 EST
The first visible, sniffable, glorious bursts of spring make the final straight of lockdown agonising. Perhaps, like me, you carry from childhood an inner voice that says pleasant weather must not be wasted. As kids, on sunny March mornings, my brothers and I lived in semi-terror of our mother rumbling up the stairs into our rooms with seize-the-day vigour.
This rarely involved a motion to lounge about eating Sherbet Dip Dabs and watching Tiswas. No, but it could involve being stuffed into an Austin Maxi and whisked to the Solway Coast to paddle in rock pools close to the Sellafield nuclear reactor, before sharing a pork pie brought from home and featuring a terrifying, greying boiled egg suspended in jelly. Or “potted meat” spread into sliced baps, though from which specific animal this peppery mush came remained a mystery. Importantly, it was drummed into us from the outset that a warm, bright day should be used, even if that involved a four-hour roun
Get out and see the world!
You worry when the weather s cold
You worry when it s hot
You worry when you re doing well
You worry when you re not
It s worry worry all the time
You don t know how to laugh
They ll think of something funny when
They write your epitaph
It s later than you think
Just when I thought I had reached the nadir of despair, fate seemed determined to prove me wrong. I contemplated rather dejectedly, as to how some one seemed to have so precisely described my hapless predicament, way back in 1950, when the proverbial apple dropped for me. I would not wait any longer. If I had to do it alone then so be it.