Sunday

Bink rang me twice last week.

Which ranks it as a really good week.

Of all the times Bink has been mad, Alex said, this must register as the least awful.

Could that be, Serena observed, because she hasn’t got someone in the background, far more poisonously nuts than she is, dragging her far further into the mire?

Why did you leave your kind friends? I dared ask.

Long silence.

You still there?

(God grant I haven’t offended her, and lost her for weeks.)

Yes, yes. Just trying to work out the answer.

A bit more silence.

Never mind. Here’s another. Have you any plans for the future?

Even longer silence.

This wasn’t supposed to be so difficult, Bink. Forget that. Let me ask something simpler. Can we help you?

Only if you’ve got a hundred pounds a day you can spare.

(So that is the cost of her current accommodation. What is it: three weeks already?)

Bink I would, if I thought it could help.

You haven’t got a hundred pounds a day.

I have savings. But I don’t think it would get you any nearer your long-term goal. It’s not worth all our savings just to keep you where you are.

Thoughtful silence.

Have you considered, I asked her, Professor Veale’s treatment plan? That you join a Christian therapeutic community?

I can’t think of that, she said. I need to solve the next week or two...

So, I thought, afterwards, if I could find a therapeutic community which might take her immediately... solve her immediate panic... might lead to a much better way to live.

Naturally, therefore, I spent the next two days ringing therapeutic communities.

Again.

She is far too ill for them. She needs to be motivated. She needs to enquire of them herself.

Always, too ill for help. Or not ill in the right way. Or in the right place.

Yet again, again, again.

What is there out there, for someone as ill as Bink?

Ah well. Sunday is a day for good news.

She rang me.

Twice.

And here are some pictures of the beautiful azaleas and rhododendrons at our friends’ beautiful party last night. Forty years being happy together.

Unfortunately I had picked up a bug from the little Viking and was extremely sick... but I could still enjoy the garden, if not the champagne.

Glass always a little full.