Marmalade

Oranges are boiling on the stove. Kitchen is full of steam - and music - Saturday morning and CD music on Radio Three. Vivaldi at the moment.

Granny has just finished and printed up fourth draft of book which will have to do for the moment. She is also marginally over-hung. Lady with the dogs came to dinner last night, plus big and little both. (Big is so tall his face turns up next to your plate, which is disconcerting - fortunately he's too polite to take a bite, though looking ever hopeful.) Lady is fond of red wine - so is Granny for whom - and for whose stomach - it isn't good. Hence the hangover. Red wine might also have been reason for weird and wild dream, involving beloved daughter-in-law setting up an extremely randy Tarts and Vicars Christmas show performed by a lot of large, or little, but all ageing, rather drunk and very suggestive ladies in revealing garments. This sets Beloved Daughter off on screaming fit. Granny is left to gather up beloved grand-daughter - actually more like daughter as a child - who doesn't appear the least phased, merely demands a bagel. Before she can supply it, Granny wakes up.

Where did that all come from???

Lady with Dogs reveals the following:

1) Dionisio - see above - is married, has children and grandchildren and would like to run his pigs sometime on our land. Granny is in favour, provided they don't eat all the herbiage, so good for birds, providing 'hotelitos for the animalitos,' as the Park Rangers put it. For sure Granny wants to protect her lizards, insects and so forth.

2) An English vulcanologist who owned three houses on Tenerife and two on this island has sold all of them, against impending volcanic activity. Granny and Beloved knew about the possible implosion of Tenerife but thought here was safe for the duration. Activity is more likely at southern end of island and will involve slow flowing lava, possible to run away from, unlike the explosive kind in Tenerife. But even so.

Lady does not inform G and B about increasing likelihood of Gulf Stream disappearing from coast of UK, lowering the temperature by 5 degrees at least. Granny read that somewhere (on the Guardian website?) Freeze to death in UK? Or be engulfed by hot lava here? What a delightful decision!

Lady also regales them with tales of her work with the seamier side of the island - ie the tourists. Last night it was a drunk young man claimed his drink had been spiked with cannabis. At midnight she was called out to translate for a fourteen year girl who'd spent a week flashing her bits at a waiter, who'd assumed therefore she was of age; she is now accusing him of sexual harrassment. What with that and chief carers randy over 50's it doesn't make being British anything to boast about. But there you go.

(View slightly uplifted though by wonderful Channel 4 programme about the trials of Charles' Ist's regicides; all in their own words and wonderfully produced and acted. As for that lovely sonorous yet austere seventeenth century prose... yummy. Some things we are good at.)

The sun is out and bright! Good good good. That'll do for today's news about the weather