Enormous sense of Wellbeing

No really. I feel like I belong in a yoghurt advert. You know that line in Blur’s ‘Parklife’?, ‘I feed the pigeons, I sometimes feed the sparrows too, it gives me an enormous sense of wellbeing. Then I’m happy for the rest of the day…’. Well that’s me that is.

Normally stepping off an aeroplane (airplane to our American cousins out there), comes with it a sense of foreboding. That inevitable return to a mountain of post, mostly bills and pens from charities. Then there’s the change in the weather – which you have plenty of time to admire through the window as the luggage handlers find new and inventive ways of dropping your suitcase so that it starts looking completely un-suitcase like in terms of its relative proportions.

The thing is, I came to realise this was all overshadowed with returning to Cardiff, except this time I wasn’t, I was going to Bristol. No long journey, no Steel Girders to put down-payments on with the people at the Second Severn Crossing, no speed camera vans on every available outpost, no sense of doom. Nothing really.

Suitcases out of the car, and then it was on to the real raison d’etre of this post – shopping for supplies. A quick stumble to the butchers and I have 6 Homemade English Farmhouse sausages to cook for tea. Move 10 metres into the next shop along and I have a thinck-sliced organic harvester loaf, and some semi-skimmed courtesy of Jess’ Ladies (yes,an organic dairy in Idyllic Gloucestershire where they name the cows!), then a saunter back past the schools’ christmas trees home – Let’s see you do that with ease in Cardiff!

Then, to cap it all off, I’m looking at Oxfam Unwrapped (Christmas Gifts). My cheque for my ‘depping’ quartet gig is in the post. My Quartet has always worked on the basis that charities get a discount on our fees – it’s our way of donating back to the charity. As I can’t be sure this was done on my behalf, I’m donating part of my fee to charity – 100 free school meals to encourage children from poorer backgrounds into school, and the planting of 25 trees to provide food and shelter, and slow soil erosion.