catch as catch can

So: Granny is home at last. ..after weeks of heavy culture and even more rain. (Which she quite likes, you understand, living where she does..as long as she doesn't get too wet.) The standard in Edinburgh, whether fringe or festival proper, was phenomenal - she won't try and list any of it; there was far too much of it, not least. It has all been somewhat overlaid, anyway, by the rather uncomfortable curiosities of the journey home, via Madrid, Barajas, not twenty-four hours after a plane, identical to the one she and Beloved were to travel in, and run by the same company, burned most of its crew and passengers to a frazzle.

The airport showed no outward signs of the tragedy. But the checking-in staff were somewhat sombre - and as for the crew - who did a very professional job, in a shadowed kind of way - what did they feel, whose friends were made toast, who might themselves have been among them, but for the vagaries of their work schedules? Not good Granny suspects; and could feel it too, watching them check doors, demonstrate safety equipment, hand out drinks, the way aircrews do. The plan of the plane on the safety card was exactly the same as the plan shown on the newspaper reports, she noted. Well it would be, wouldn't be, being the same model of plane. Oh dear: oh dear, Sitting with Beloved in the airport, close to the same gate probably - most of the Canary planes go from one or other of the same gates - listening to the same announcements as their ill-fated predecessors the day before -felt pretty creepy, she must admit. The king and queen had come by earlier in the day, but there was no sign of them by then, no hint of anything untoward whatever, despite the havoc of so little time before. But that was almost the creepiest thing of all.

Oh the poor poor families. Just suppose it had been theirs?

But they got home safely, of course. Unlike all those poor toasted others. It is hot, windy, so humid from the low cloud that everything on this island is growing mould, where it is not withering up. Sometimes it is doing both at once. Granny has been too busy preparing for some unexpected (paying) guests to descend into her usual state of post-travel melancholy yet- Beloved is much better at re-entries than she ever is - but she will quickly expel the black dog when it does show up, very soon. She just wishes her family didn't live so far away that's all..... It's good to be warm again, though. And Beloved has made a little fountain in the courtyard in the front. Lovely him. Good.