Gallivanting...part two

What surprise I wonder…lies beyond the gate?

Here at last, ten months on…with enormous apologies to paid subscribers for whom I know I’ve been saying repeatedly that I’ll send a little something extra…is the continuation of Gallivanting! I’ve just needed the right moment, but I sure never meant for it to take this long!

Back in August of last year, I have a funny feeling I left you on the platform at Victoria Station…which is not the most satisfactory way (or place) to leave you hanging! (Oh no…now I have that exclamation from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in my head: “In a handbag? At Victoria Station?”). On the other hand…the state of suspense has the propensity to lift a dull day…

The down side is that all this time on, some of the emotive thoughts that were of such consequence at the time, the kind inclined to come with gallivanting, with being high above the clouds and freed from normality, have dissipated. Thoughts and observations that rang clear as a bell then…are somewhat muddied now. So…I’ll push those down the road for the time being, as clearly they’re still not properly resolved.

Instead…picking up where I left off…I can assure you that the subsequent train journey swept along…with satisfying interludes of speed, but annoying intervals too, of travelling at a snail’s pace. Ultimately, although running late, at last the train delivered me to the station at which I needed to arrive; from where I took a taxi…whose befuddled driver had not previously had the need (but it was the only way I could get there that day!) to follow the directions to a particular gate in the countryside, that would allow access to one particular drive that would bring us to an old farm Apple Store, of rosy bricks with duck-egg blue windows and doors - one of which through I tiptoed a good 1/2 hour late for the introduction to what was about to unfold, for I’d secured the one and only ticket that day (indeed that entire week!), to visit…