Stop press: Eldest beloved granddaughter has sent - or her parents have sent - photo of herself holding up own version of Frida Kahlo's self-portrait. What it is to have an 8 year old grand-daughter obsessed with such an (unsuitable perhaps? what does she make of the pierced limbs. cut open bellies?) painter discovered in a book on your shelves! She shows signs of liking opera too. This is too much. Youngest beloved grand-daughter, meanwhile, aged 3 - not beautiful exactly, like her wonderfully oddball elder sister but full of what granny's long dead mother would have called 'oomph' - is the Zuleika Dobson of her new nursery class - all the little boys are following her around. This may be a slightly more double-edged achievement, if maintained, in adolescence, let alone maturity, but nice all the same. From here granddaughters do seem so near and yet so very far. A problem. Granny misses them. It's called EXILE.

Cactus flower still living! Grannyp