Walls -

Granny is in a bit of a twitch. Beloved Nephew - son of Beloved, alas dead, Twin Sister is about to produce ...twins....girls. Or rather his wife is. This can't possibly be genetic, the gene for twins - one Granny's family seems to have, alongside the breast cancer one - is passed on through females. But still. Beloved Nephew's wife is now 38 weeks pregnant, the twins weigh around 5 pounds each and they won't be left in there much longer. Granny has had her English mobile charged up for weeks, waiting for news. Well, you know. In this case she cannot but be affected. She is. Twitch, twitch. (Relieved just a little by Mozart on the radio just now, but that's not enough.)

Meantime she must amuse herself with the goings on on her island. Here is the next one, as promised.

Mr Jonah the headmaster is very proud of his school - which has its merits- and its demerits - but we won't go into all that here: enough to say that Beloved who does the odd bit of teaching there tries to be a bit subversive in a quiet way to make up for this and that.

To demonstrate just how proud he is of his school Mr Jonah has flags flying outside it - Spanish, British and EEC flags. Also on the waste ground between the in road one side and the out side on the other there sits a wide white buffer thing proclaiming - proudly - for all to see Colegio Hispanic-Britannico: Mr Jonah speaks fluent Spanish. Unfortunately, he has aroused the wrath of an 80 year old woman who thinks the land leading up to the school, including the buffer thing and the in-road and the out-road belong to her (she might even have a point - Mr Jonah was an estate agent once and who knows what went on; not that the land would have been any use to her or anyone else; it is arid and barren in the extreme, hers or Mr Jonah's, whatever. But neither would see it like that.)

Yesterday morning Granny and Beloved turned up there in their truck - Beloved runs a Saturday morning project club - to find the in-road impassable: two lines of rocks had been laid across it, while two men and a yellow bulldozer -moon-lighting it turned out from Rancho Texas, the theme park down the the road - were busy laying more. As for the proud white buffer, a rough stone wall had been built in front of it, totally concealing Colegio Hispanic-Britannico. On the rocks in the wall, and in the rocks on the road a big red N was painted. (It meant 'no' most likely unless the name of the 80 year old indignant one began with N.) Saturday was probably thought to be a non-working day: Granny suspects that the in-road might have been blocked too with N marked rocks, had the Saturday morning teachers not turned up. If so the blockade would have been complete and nothing should have been discovered till schooltime on Monday. (The men from Rancho Texas could have come on Sunday of course, but they'd have cost much more in expensive over-time.)

Mr Jonah who likes his Saturday lie-in did not get it. When Granny came back to collect Beloved, his car was outside the school, Mr J himself was on the telephone and the police had been called. She is dying to know what happened next. Was Mr J going to hire the men and the yellow bulldozer for himself to remove the rocks and restore his proud sign to sight, someone on Saturday afternoon or Sunday? - at a bigger cost in overtime? Beloved gives another class on Wednesday. Granny will find out more then.

She shouldn't laugh, she knows, but that hasn't stopped her giggling ever since. Pride you could say has come, yet again, before (behind) a ..wall.

(Sorry...)