8:40 p.m. - 2024-03-28
Toodlepip Sweetness

A wasted day today mostly, and I so want to moan about it but bearing in mind what she said the other day about not bringing my troubles with me when I see her, I'll save this moan to share with her. Suffice to say the fibre-optic fiasco continues and it's wearing me down slowly but surely.

One thing I did do as I waited patiently for engineers to show up today was dredge through two decades of digital archives looking for the poem I wrote for R on her sixteenth birthday all those years ago. Surprisingly, I did find the original text file draft and a low quality scan of the photo sheet. Two decades ago, my monitor had a resolution of 1024 x 768 which was decent at the time. My current 5K screen makes stuff from back then appear small, grainy, and difficult to read. My eyes being two decades older doesn't help either.

Curiously, R got the name of the poem wrong. Your Mother Is Your Best Friend was actually the over-riding sentiment and message in the poem. That line is mentioned several times to make the point. I guess it worked, and she remembers it that way. The actual poem title was Life Lessons For A Teenage Daughter. As it was written specifically for her, tailored to echo her family situation, and my knowing how good a mother she had, it was easy to write but it isn't really a poem for every mother/daughter scenario. It was a reminder to me that sometimes the kind little gestures we make in life for the people we meet can make for long lasting memories, in this case a fond one for R.

I'm not sure I'll share it with Marion unless she pesters me for it. It was, and still is quite a personal poem. I'm no poet either, and it does have a cheesy factor to it in the style of William Topaz McGonagall, the Scottish poet well known for writing dreadfully bad poetry. If you don't have an aversion to bad poetry, his entire works are here. Nora, The Maid of Killarney is a good one to start with. It's quality reading.

I also found stuff I thought was long gone. It is now but before I deleted everything, I read through old MSN messenger archives from someone who used to call herself Wishing Fairy. Her words did invoke an emotional response of sorts. It was mostly sadness I felt. I'll sign off tonight as she always did with her signature catchphrase at the time. This time it's from me to her, sent down through the mists of time, as that is the only place where she still lives.

⭐️ Toodlepip Sweetness xx ⭐️