Drove home. Unpacked. Sitting at my desk, writing in my diary, on Sonntag. When Leigh went to that conference in Munich, on logical languages (Esperanto, Simplified English), she bought this diary, this Tagebuch. She said when she saw it, she was thinking of it as one of my Christmas presents. But then she remembered Mum always buys me a diary, so she better have it for herself (although Leigh doesn’t usually keep a diary – apart from her academic one). On Christmas Day, Mum said she had been intending to get me the usual diary – to order it online – but that she’d forgotten. She was embarrassed but also, I could tell, exhausted. All this keeping up with the usual rituals is becoming difficult for her. I tried to make as little of it as possible, although her forgetting upset me – not because she’d forgotten my present, but because if she were her healthy self, she’d never forget something like that. I realized the chemotherapy was making her iller than she’d let on. Of course, I said it was fine, I could easily get the diary myself; and then Leigh mentioned she had this spare one which she wasn’t going to use. ‘I’ll give it to him when we get home,’ she said, ‘as if it’s from you.’ Mum wanted to give her some money for it, Leigh tried to refuse, but Mum insisted – so this Tagebuch is from both of them. I don’t know if I’ll get used to the days of the week, although I love Mittwoch for Wednesday. Midweek. It’s very practical, like Mandarin days of the week (Oneday, Twoday…) but makes me wonder where they put Woden. Was he too Norse for them? A couple of the summer months are lazily shared – August, September (but November, too) – and for some, English just finesses a letter: Dezember, Oktober. März is heavy-metal-umlaut month. Januar and Februar save energy, just like Mum, by forgetting the y’s. Mai is kin to Czech Maj. But Juni and Juli are like skipping rhymes. Oh, April’s lazy, too. English months came from Northern Europe, didn’t they? We started to export our language and time later. The paper of the Tagebuch is good for writing; the edges of the letters don’t go spidery, and the ink is sucked in without me having to leave the page open for five minutes. As usual, I feel the thickness of pages, between me and the desktop, and wonder what will happen to be written on them. I don’t think Mum will buy me another diary.
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