Love is a packed lunch

My rucksack is smallish and black and has everything I need for the moment. It's not much.  In the back, wrapped in a bag from Marks and Spencer's, there is a parcel of food for me that my mum made. A small prepacked salad, a Tupperware container, an apple, and a small foil- shrink-wrapped chocolate bar trying to be healthy. I open the Tupperware and the sandwich inside has been cut into a tangram so it fits under the protection of the plastic box. Two large slides of soft whole meal bread, hand sliced lettuCe, soft cheese and cheddar -  product of careful knife work and considered selection.

My mother continues her 26 years of care for me, much of it involving food preparation and her lifetime of serving for a family as cook and more. She doesn't think about it anymore - half custom, half duty - but I feel loved by the care she puts into preparing a perfect little meal for me.  She's been feeding me fruit since I was little, but it's been more important since my dad died of bowel cancer. My odds on getting it too aren't great, but are improved by fruit and veg.

Filling someone's basic needs, the small things that don't rank respect or recognition, the incremental preventatives rather than the grand cures - taking the time to do the things that go unnoticed, that is love.

Small town living. Part of an occasional series.

Great things about my home town, pop 75k, thinking pop, approx 35 The cathedral toilets are twinned with a latrine in burundi. Not the cathedral, just the toilets - not with other toilets, just a latrine. There is a photo and a plaque the commemorate the cultural exchange. Shops consider 3-5.30 wednesday thru Friday to be acceptable opening hours for a business. Shops selling vertiginous sequinned union jack platforms, no less. There is an asparagus festival. It features gus the asparagus man making visits, a demonstration of asparagus tying, an asparagus crown - and for those who can't make it to the festival, there is the portable asparabus.