Thursday, December 20, 2007

Images of Christmas
















christmas lunch

Christmas lunch with my grandparents with a sixpence hidden in the pudding !


Family Christmas lunch last year, less formal, no sixpence in the pudding , but still fun !!

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Sisters


















We look nothing alike,
She came ten years after!
She is generous and caring,
Infuriatingly boring when she is drunk
An angel when she is sober
And life would be very bleak without her !!






















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My beautiful sister

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Saturday, November 3, 2007

Window shopping and a very wet Venice!















































































I am such a lazy blogger, I think it is because when I get inspired , I sometimes suspect that there is nobody out there , anyway this month, I have a wonderful excuse , I have been very busy showing all my relatives and friends around Italy. I am an extremely reluctant tourist and would rather be under the covers on my beautiful soft couch but really having being dragged out to see things I really do love the world around me !

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Friday, September 21, 2007

SMOKING GUN !

I found this fascinating photo of my mother Madeleine, she was a fleet street journalist in the heady era of 'check book journalism ', I have no idea what this strange picture was connected to but I imagine that she was probably writing an article of how woman had become sophisticated smoking in bars and flaunting their new found freedom ! I can also imagine that since she had to rush the article for the Sunday press she used herself for a model and probably charged the newspaper the expenses !!! I really have no idea but I love this, today naughty image !

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

THE BEST OF THE ITALIAN SUMMER





























Our Summer holiday











Henrietta, my sister looked quite smug, as she mused the future holiday, " this time it will be wonderful , we have a villa with a swimming pool and I have checked everything , not like last year in that grotty apartment that you chose " . I had already hung my head in shame remembering the last year which had proved very disappointing in a tiny apartment with no room for us , so I was quite happy to let her organise this year .
It had been my suggestion from the start to exchange our summer houses in order to see other places and give our children other experiences and it seemed a cheap way of arranging accommodation. so I was quite happy with to let her get on with it and didn't even check out the details of where we were going until the last moment .
We were heading for Alicante in Spain and as we landed,it did seem rather barren , there were no trees or green, it all seemed rather dry and lots of building cranes around but as they are always building around airports I still had my hopes quite high and even ignored the comments of my driver who asked me why on earth we were coming from" beautiful Italy "to this place, however he did manage to make me feel slightly uneasy as we were zooming up the motorway and the scenery was not improving . in the distance, I could see rows and rows of little white houses and even more building cranes, I was still feeling optimistic and was looking forward to arriving at our private villa !

Our villa was horrendous , it was a tiny bungalow , we could hardly get in it for ugly furniture, the bedrooms were very small and poky , It was unbearably hot and the sun terrace was just the flat roof of the building, with a view of a main road and a sofa factory . it was so ghastly that it was beyond description . The area was a kind of neglected, newly built ,shanty town with only for sale signs outside, the area had prostitutes on the corner, the beach was a least half an hour away , drug pushers were on the other corner and it had a little supermarket and one pub, the swimming pool was to be shared with all the other poor victims of the shanty town . There was only one thought in my head when I arrived, it was to ESCAPE !!
(more on this another time !!)

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Marco


All's well that ends well !


Yesterday, I spent the day with my dear friend Marco, we had lunch together at his country house , while we were listening to the birds chatter and the dogs were prancing around the garden, we started musing about the incredible circumstances that had allowed us to be enjoying such a pleasant time in such lovely surroundings, and he gave me permission to write on my blog his uplifting story




Marco has been one of my closest friends since the day he turned up at my door in a very grave state of depression , reeling with shock by the fact that his girlfriend had fallen in love with a woman and from one day to the next he had been kicked out of their shared home and his personal belongings returned along with all their personal photos cut in half !
At the time we were all single in our twentysomthing , relishing freedom , listening to beautiful music, flirting with ideals, experimenting love affairs and the makeshift dinner table was usually a mixture of spaghetti and wonderfully amusing conversation ! Marco blended in beautifully, he was very ironic and his sense of self depreciation were sometimes gloomy and at other times hilarious .
He lived in various accommodations, renting rooms and sharing flats all over town, and love filtered into and out of his life with always disastrous consequences . (not that we were doing any better) but Marco's stories were always touched with unusual aspects , he had parked his old banger of a car outside the Brazilian embassy in Rome, a bomb went off and destroyed only his car and the insurance refused to pay for the damage! . Who has ever heard of Brazilian terrorists anyway !

Eventually he ended up living in a tiny hovel in Via del Orso, which is a charming cobbled stoned street round towards the back of Pza Navona, his place was on the ground floor and damp and was positioned in a tiny courtyard. He shared it with his cat who seemed to be constantly pregnant! Every time I used to visit him, there would be always a new batch of kittens mixed in with his books .
To make matters worse, they started to build an elevator in the courtyard and after the noise of the building there would be a whooshing noise every time that they called the lift .

I would go often to Marco's hole (as he called it) and we would eat together with the whooshing noises and then go out for a coffee, he was becoming slightly despondent and his search for true love was diminishing as he felt he had nothing to offer. I remember one night particularly, it was raining and I could hear the noise of the drain pipes along with the damp on the walls and the kittens at my feet that I began to agree with him and could offer no consolation .

However I had my own life to worry about and one night I was watching the news on the television, and the sight of Marco's building flashed onto the screen, and I turned up the volume and there was the description of how an old lady on the top floor had left the gas on , and there had been a terrible explosion and had caused the complete collapse of the building , It had happened at lunch time and fortunately Marco had gone to meet friends for lunch but his cat was somewhere under the rubble !

Unlike, the car insurance people, the Rome authorities had a obligation to rehouse Marco in exactly the same area , and they gave him a beautiful apartment for a council price right next to Pza Navona, one of the most prestigious squares in Rome, we all danced with glee, it was like winning the lottery

.Eventually , they offered him the flat to buy and Marco bought it with someones money and made a high profit. He then proceeded to buy a villa outside of Rome and lives there with his young beautiful wife called Carla. His dusty (now sterilized) cat was found under the rubble three days after the collapse and spends her last days lying on his bed in the villa, with a smile on her face !

Friday, May 4, 2007

Dreaming !


I always thought that if I became a rock star (hardly likely as I can't sing or play any musical instrument!) I would have liked this photo of myself for my album cover !

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Friday, March 16, 2007

Can you resist a face like this ?


More about the enticing Charlotte another day !

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Lazy Sunday Afternoon !


Before I forget, If you are in the Bristol area in England, and if you want a pleasant Sunday afternoon, check out Paola Casalino's , exhibition , her paintings are wonderful, wild and vibrant !

Friday, March 9, 2007

Thursday, March 8, 2007

RAFFLES


Raffles , my dog, is really a dignified creature, he enjoys an enormous amount of street cred, he wanders around the streets of Rome and Fondi without a lead , he goes to the best restaurants in town and they let him in, because they know that his behaviour is impeccable , He visits friend's houses by himself maybe looking for me, and helps himself to a bit of food and then he politely departs . He waits outside the supermarket for hours on end having to put up with little old ladies fussing over him . He goes to the beach in the summer and sleeps under the umbrella and pops into the sea to cool down.
He has two girlfriends, Polly, who is nice to him and Toffee ,who treats him mean and keeps him keen ! I met him seven years ago outside some scruffy hotel hanging out for a bit of pizza, he was covered in car oil and fleas, he had short legs and a long body and he wasn't at all appealing and I needed some convincing to take him home , but thank goodness I did , I called him Raffles after the best hotel in the world and ended up with the best dog in the world ! He so impressed a friend of mine from America, that she sent him this pink coat to keep him warm in the winter!, Raffles would not be seen dead in this coat on the streets, it would ruin his reputation , but he did pose for the thank you photo with as much dignity that he could muster !