Daffodils – Saint David’s Day (1 March 2010)

Tricia-Cheryl-Emma travels to Monmouth, Wales on St. David's Day. And then to life.

Daffodils - Saint David’s Day (1 March 2010)

 

It didn’t start only with the bus announcements going wrong. Tricia-Cheryl-Emma was on her way to a momentous family meeting. It was lunch at a restaurant. But you could guarantee that nobody would spare digestive juices just for eating. For gulping in gossip and embarrassment  - well, yes. They were definitely avid for that.

 

The bus was headed up for Monmouth and not just the High Street. Tricia-Cheryl-Emma would be getting off at the poshest stop. She cuddled her bunch of daffodils. They were the first promising stalks from the sheltered side of the cottage garden -  delayed after the long winter, and not yet blasted by the ongoing election campaign. Tricia-Cheryl-Emma appreciated these greenish buds were too tender to be affected by everyone’s TV and radio on eternal alert. And they would be returned to their own botanical karma before David  -  why did he have to have the same name as our blessed national Saint?  -  before posh boy David Cameron’s entry into No. 10.

 

It did it again. The automatic bus stop announcement system chuckled, ahemed, and gave the wrong place name, again! And it was in English. And for central London. They all sailed through the petite Welsh valleys, but were being instructed that they were heading down the ‘Strand’ ….  ‘Trafalgar Square’. So would they get to see ‘Buckingham Palace’ and the Royal Wonders? The bus passengers were being driven as mad as the announcement lady.

 

It’s eccentric enough that Tricia-Cheryl-Emma has three English names. And yet she’s as Welsh as her daffodils. Blame her mother, and morning television, seventeen years ago, when Tricia-Cheryl-Emma was yet an expectant string of DNA. And that brought her thoughts back to  - ‘Haymarket’  -  that surrealist announcement lady again -  back to her father, that other twist of ancestral DNA, which waltzed around her mother, kicked up enough of an essential trace of itself, and skipped off to England for good.

 

Her father! Now waiting in a posh Monmouth restaurant, for her and her slim, not-bought-for-cash bouquet. And her father’s new fiancée; and also the rest of the family, their mouths working inquisitively and competitively.

 

Tricia-Cheryl-Emma alighted at ‘Piccadilly Circus’. And it could have been. Because this was the fashionable lanes of Monmouth by the Town Hall, and that painted statue of a lady with a crown. ‘Queen Anne’ it said. Why wasn’t she just simply Anne, when she had such a simple life, outside her dreams, and her mother (who was furiously still at her cottage television, uninvited).

 

She had a full shot of the family gathering, framed by the restaurant window, and only blocked by one determined, freezing smoker. A f*g butt was drawn in for the last time, then cast off.  This random ‘uncle’ decamped. And Tricia-Cheryl-Emma espied, for the one and only occasion, her future step-mother. She was a seventeen-year old brunette, the mirror image of herself.

 

It seemed, emotionally, only minutes later that Tricia-Cheryl-Emma was on the real London bus, and the announcements truly fitted the world outside the windows. Those youthful daffodils had never been delivered. Maybe Saint David had blessed Tricia-Cheryl-Emma’s transportation from her family.