Life Is For Living

Visiting Aunt Elise in Switzerland taught me so much...

- Kirk Houston.

IT was seven a.m. when I woke up in the car beside Malcolm, although I'd been aware of waking a couple of hours beforehand and had glimpsed an apricot sunrise streaking a French sky.

It's hard to stay fully asleep in a moving car.

We had caught the midnight ferry from Dover to Dunkirk and Malcolm had dozed briefly on the crossing, knowing that he would be driving all night for the rest of our journey.

It was how he liked to travel. No stops apart from essential ones.

That was typical of my husband.

Take the fastest route.

No finesse. Brusque, sometimes.

He didn't mean to be comfort was a luxury he rarely had time for.

Malcolm had been a professional driver all his life. He'd driven lorries all across the continent.

He thought nothing of driving the 500 plus miles from England, across France and on to our final destination, Switzerland.

I smiled as I yawned and moved the passenger seat from recline to upright.

"You're awake," Malcolm remarked.

"I am. How are you doing?

You must be tired." "I'm all right. We'll pit-stop in an hour or so.

Are you OK till then?" "Fine, thanks." Neither of us spoke for a while after that.

France was all flat countryside: a landscape dotted with tractors and those huge automatic irrigation systems that look like giant Meccano.

structures rolling across the land spraying water, not stopping, endlessly working.

If Malcolm was a vehicle he'd be an irrigation system. Basic.

Hardworking. Practical.

I would be a top of the range car with leather seats, a heated steering wheel, a sat-nav and sound system and a dashboard with more lights and buttons than the cockpit of an aeroplane.

Complicated and luxurious.

We've been married 32 years. We're as different as topsoil and spring air.

Sometimes I don't know how we've survived.