Tea and Cake

I've just returned from having tea (and a rather delicious piece of lemon drizzle cake) with a friend in town. We met at a  local cafe called Reubans, part cafe, part wine bar. It's a very relaxing place where you never feel rushed, even if you sit for hours with one pot of tea. It sells an excellent range of malt whiskies, which is definitely a plus, although a minus for my purse. Last year my husband and I went to a whiskey tasting there, put on by Adelphi Bottlers,a fabulous range of six generous helpings of whisky, accompanied by cheese and biscuits. I needed the carbohydrates to sop up and walk home! Not that I was drunk, far from it, just a little tipsy. We had the oldest whisky I have ever tasted there (at least at that time), a single grain, yes, grain not malt, whisky that was 46 years old. Wonderful.

Anyway, back to today, I had tea with Gillian, one of my few friends. I am not being sad when I say that but realistic. I don't really do friends en masse, never had, and I doubt if I ever will. That is not to say that I am lonely. I have family and a few friends I treasure. There is a great difference between being alone and being lonely. It may stem from being brought up in the country where there were few other kids my age, or from being a only child. Or it might just be intrinsic to me. It can't be just genetic as my mother is a socialite, the type of person who makes life-long friends on a train journey, and, as far  I know, my father was very social too.

Gillian

Truth about me:

I am very rarely lonely, I have enough hobbies to last me the rest of my life, and a never ending queue of books to read. I also have to be interested in people all day at work. Alone time is precious, but I do value the few people who I can talk about anything with, without having to fill in the gaps, or pretend to be conformist.

On googling 'alone but not lonely' there is a large number of results, including the song lyrics I was trying to track down. Interesting how many people find the need to talk about it. Most seemed to be trying to convince others, or possibly themselves, that solitude is not an illness. It is, in truth, a long tradition, including many religious hermits of many faiths. I think it is easier to be lonely in a crowd. There is a book that I am halfway through reading, part of the ever increasing list, called 'A Book of Silence'. While silence is not the same as solitude they have similarities, and both are, too me, valuable.

Knitting going apace, working on the third part of my first love potion. Yes I'm officially a witch. A good one, an earth witch, and I still have yesterday's earth under my nails to prove it.