Monday 19^th November

Pete and I had a family weekend in Launceston.  We were In Charge of three girls aged (approximately) 9, 5 and 18 months.  I had organised all manner of creative activities, which went down well – the beautiful, elegant house is now festooned with paintings, collages, a reasonably edible banana cake (this is not festooned, you will be pleased to hear…) and a few strings of paper dolls, tastefully watercoloured. 

I thought the most popular and rewarding activity would be making pompoms.  Not so!  The girls wound the yarn around the cardboard circles a few times then discarded them for activities which promised more instant gratification.  So yesterday afternoon you would have seen, in the sunny back garden,:

• One small girl dancing happily, clutching two bunnies and sucking on a dummy

• One tall girl doing cartwheels on the trampoline

• One middle-sized girl making cups of tea for her imaginary guest in her cubbyhouse

• And…one 66 year old man dedicatedly making a most beautiful pompom….

(Yes ofcourse I made a pompom as well, but mine was a rush job, nowhere near as beautifully constructed as Pete’s.)

We also managed to include visits from most of my Launceston family.  The girls were very intrigued with their new friends and now Grace has an imaginary kitten called Gina… (My mother impressed her very much, especially by telling her that her name is really Regina, which means QUEEN.)

India #21

On the beach right outside our Colmar Beach Besort there was an upturned derelict boat.  I was fascinated to find that it housed two happy families - a pig family and a dog family.  Not sure if there were daddypigs and daddydogs – probably, nothing at all seems to be spayed or desexed or segregated in India – but there certainly were piglets and puppies and mummies.  They all lived together perfectly happily, with piglets and puppies romping around on the sand, and sleeping in one big wet heap when the monsoon poured down.  I gooed and gaa-ed about them and took cute photos.  Pete was less impressed.  Hmmm, he would say, eyeing them nervously.  He had already told all of us NEVER to order any sort of pork in India.  This was hard for him, he loves bacon and eggs and it was always on the menu.  He was a bit reticent about telling us why, but finally we realised that the role of pigs is to clean up all human sewage… That was why the pigs and dogs were flourishing right outside our resort… Not an edifying thought, but how very efficient, ecologically!