Strangers on a train

Before I ventured to Bodnant Gardens 

Mary and I visited the Horizon Cafe on Colwyn Bay’s Promenade.

You still cannot sit on the outside tables there, but the cafe does the best brewed coffee and so I treated myself to a grande and Mary to a single sausage .

We sat on the raised flower beds and watched the sea.

The woman with the Welsh Terrier stopped. 

I had met her before several times and she commented how neat Mary looked.

Her Bertie looked scruffy and unkept and remained uninterested in Mary as he always seemed to be

The woman stopped intent on talking.

She wore a straw hat and dungarees and looked around sixty

I wasn’t bothered one way or another .

The conversation flowed immediately to lockdown. 

The woman asked if I was furloughed and I told her where I worked.

She had lost her job in a solicitors office last year, she told me but didn’t miss it

She also asked if there were many men working as nurses at the hospice as she presumed it was more a mature woman’s role.

Back to the nun’s perception of palliative care I thought and said so

But she was right , like primary school teaching ,palliative care seems less populated by male workers.

She asked a lot of questions and instead of fending them off, I found that I was answering them

How long had I been working at the hospice?

What made me pick it?

Why had I gone back to work after retiring?

She was relentless

But I answered her questions as if she was working for the gestapo 

There is something very flattering about someone being interested in you and when I said I was divorced 

She shared the fact that she had left her husband the day after she lost her job.

“I think you and I are like Anne Elliot from Persuasion” she said with a laugh before she moved on with the scruffy Bertie in tow

“ We are late To Bloom,”