On Planet Expat (Memories)

The photo is of the road to Abqaiq - one that I travelled both by bus and car in my expat years.  I was thinking in my previous blog about how old age is ongoing loss. Though it is not of course only that.  We go on learning, experiencing, and adding layer upon layer of memory, seeing new meaning in the past.

This is picture from our life on Planet Expat - 25 years that seem to have rushed past and vanished.  But it reminds me how the heat and the dust and camels on the side of the road became so familiar over the years.  I remember one time arriving back at Dhahran airport, the old one, after a visit to a very wintry UK and drinking in the dusty heat and smell of oil and thinking "We're home."

But our real home will be in the restored earthly paradise. And the memories we make there, during the Thousand Years, and then on through unnumbered years, will all be happy ones.  Which is most certainly not the way it is now.

Anyway, what spectacular things have I been doing?  I made a fruit cake on Monday, as I needed to re-stock the freezer with cakes for Col's Detectorist lunches.  It's a boil and bake cake from a Cranks recipe book the Captain bought me years ago. In all the years I have been making it, it has never turned out badly, yet.  It has to be made in two parts really, as the fruit mix has to cool down before you add the eggs. So I simmered the fruit and sugar and jam and orange zest and juice in the morning and added the dry ingredients in the afternoon.

When I made it in Saudi Arabia, I could use fresh dates - freshly picked at that, with our own fair hands.

That and getting the meals and doing my study for the day was pretty much it.  Captain Moth-Butterfly was home cleaning, sorting and classifying his finds from the weekend.  Always nice to have him with me.

The cake got the thumbs-up from Captain B, and of course being a fruitcake it ought to improve with keeping as well.

Us siblings had our usual Zoom chat on Monday morning and Col and his siblings chatted on Monday evening. All seems well. And I had my usual Zoom with a friend this morning. As she is the same age as me we talked a lot about our medical issues... oh dear.

And I posted a couple of letters to the Care Homes on the roads we did on Saturday.