Yesterday was Halloween, today is All Saint's Day; tomorrow - November 2nd - is the Day of the Dead. Now at last w've got that sorted. Latter seems appropriate day for this year's US election. Granny's many ghosts will be walking tomorrow alongside candidates B&K.

B&K in her youth, of course, meant Bulganin and Krushchev - oh those long ago days when we were scared of nuclear bombs lobbed from without, rather than god knows what exploded suicidally within. (Is always being frightened of something a necessary componant of survival, she wonders. Or just a means of exerting political control? A fiendish alliance, possibly.) Granny's ghosts don't scare her: just make her a little sad; among them this year for the first time her so aged dad. Shame she can't put paper money on all their tombs, as in Chinese festival of hungry ghosts... that would lay them; assuming she wanted them laid. Problem is all her tombs are scattered and so very far away.

Last morning on this Canarian island for two whole weeks. To dislocation of clock change, summer to winter (t'other way about for Aussie sister) add change of homes. In each home she aches for the other. In London she will no longer to be woken by dogs in the night, only by cars and people outside the window. Light like shots in dark velvet, leaves on the ground. Here no leaves fall - light is stronger for being lower, wind cooler, that's all. And up in our high place, sun in early morning is quickly replaced by cloud; if we're lucky then again by sun. Maybe when granny returns in two weeks time the miraculous skin of green will have crept across the hills. Maybe - she's never sure of their dates - the pop pop of hunters will no longer be legal on Wednesdays Sundays and fiestas like today and feline Houdini will no longer have to be kept indoors in case hunting dogs mistake him for a rabbit.

A Catholic country is always having fiestas; nice if it means you don't have to work; not so nice if you run out of milk or fruit, the electricity fails or you are waiting for something to be delivered. Our load from UK still has not arrived. Tomorrow they say. Beloved will now have to deal with it alone. Granny meanwhile will be living it up with friends and minding small children. Merrily merrily. She had better go and pack.

In one supermarket here they have taken to selling someone's brand of 99% chocolate; a weird, severe, not to say penitential treat. 'Lay a small piece on your tongue' the packet urges. 'Let it melt.' And so it does, ever more seductively as you warm to the bitterness. 'Chocolate - cocoa - is addictive, that's all,' urges the scientist who granny loves. Whom she will be without for the next few days.

This last treat - being alone - she thinks is a bit like the chocolate treat; a guilty and bitter pleasure. Loving someone does not mean ceasing to enjoy your own company, and grabbing that with both hands if offered. (This last view of course cannot be offered to Beloved, who like most men cannot understand how someone can love you and yet want to be free of you, some - but not much - of the time. ) ENOUGH. Might post from London. Might not. Big tidy up now. Then off. Grannypx