Granny will be flying...

Granny is off tomorrow. She'll spend some of Monday with precious little lone twin then take off at some hideously early hour on Tuesday with 2 of her ex-Oxford group of girls for Italy where there'll join a third. All lovely except that the merry little group is hardly one of girls any more. The trip is to celebrate 50 years of friendship -help! - - and a 3 day walk they did then along Hadrian's Wall, none of them fit and none of them with proper footwear; but they made it, blisters and all. She thinks- hopes- they know better now.

This trip will be much more sybaritic: they're staying at a delicious-looking Calabrian B&B this time- as compared to very austere youth hostels and equal austere B&B's then, both kinds of hostelry freezing cold and latter featuring slippery brown lino and disapproving landladies. Much pasta will be eaten - the Italian landlady is a celebrated Italian cook - and much wine consumed. Fifty year old trip as Granny remembers was entirely dry. Oh, those were the days - all of us in love then, but the husbands in the process of being acquired are now all dead and gone. Women it seems live longer, so though old age is not exactly to be celebrated we can and do celebrate each other. We will. Bibulously for sure.

Granny is then taking Beloved to Venice to a borrowed flat to celebrate, belatedly, his 70th birthday and both of them are having a party in Bristol at the end of June to celebrate that and also her own 70th birthday in mid June. Family and quasi-family come to 20 odd in all and to that some very old friends have been added - plus some 70's music to groove to. It should be fun.

Can anyone suggest the odd hangover cure??

Granny will be glad to leave Lanzarote for a month or so anyway. Trade winds weather - wind everywhere, persistently cloudy up here - has set in and she is not at all fond of that. So no looking back longingly on volcanos. And anyway, if she was feeling volcano-less, she and the rest of them are flying to Naples first and visiting Pompeii so she can feast her homesickness on Mt Etna. Let's hope it doesn't erupt... Not that the four of them wouldn't make lovely ash-hardened fossils. Given that they are half-way there already.

'Sta Luego. She'll post again from London. Perhaps.