Day 39- Tables

Before setting out, we linger even longer over breakfast, imagining how our furniture would look in another house, what we would keep, what we wouldn't. I wonder how the long pale table could be perfect anywhere but in the purple kitchen.

In the afternoon we drive deep west under the playful light and the heavy bodies of clouds accumulating while the windscreen is flecked with the delicate bodies of insects raining against us. The honey perfume of the fields and radio 2 follow us all the way and I spot sweaty leather bikers stopping to buy strawberries for sale in the lay by. We discuss how we would spend 86 million.

Later, much later, we gather round, cradling cups of brick red tea and listening to my grandfather, the missionary, the milkman, telling more of his stories.

You don't need a big house, you just need a table big enough to get us all round, he says.

You don't need to win the lottery, just enough for a table.