Parliamo Italiano?

First Italian Conversation class yesterday evening, and it was fun. The teacher is from Cuba, so her first language is Spanish. She's lively and fun - just what you need to get everyone relaxed and interacting with each other. My brain was hurting by the end, but so much of the language is familiar from opera that it doesn't feel too strange. I'm going to do as much homework as I can: I'm determined not to be the dunce of the class.

There's a lady there I've already met, though I only recognised her at first by her very odd name, and I'm sure she won't recognise me. I was introduced to her at a party as we apparently had being Irish in common. "How do you do?" she asked me in her cut glass accent. "I believe you're Aahrish like me." (????????????????). "I am indeed," I replied, dropping into a bit of the auld sod talk, an honest bogtrotter. "And sure where is it now that you're after being from yourself, at all, at all?" Not quite, but a bit. "My people have owned Kilkenny Castle since the days of Cromwell," she told me. "I'm descended from" (and here she named some English blighters who were given land stolen from the Kings of Tara, and went on to rule the country before Independence. I couldn't repeat their names). "Oh how interesting," I said. "I'm descended from Red Hugh O'Neill and Nial of the Nine Hostages, the High Kings of Ireland." And as my father would have added "and the seven snotty orphans". I do hope she won't remember me.

More lawn developments. John from Armagh (proper Oirish him) was coming tomorrow to rotovate the grass before removing it and laying the new lawn. But he didn't realise that there is still meadowgrass growing there, and it would have been scattered everywhere only to grow again. Now someone is coming to kill the stuff tomorrow instead, then John will come next week to remove the dead stuff and re-lay. And so it goes on. I'm going to put bags over my new shrubs before the sprayer comes or they'll be murdered too. I could murder someone, though a blood-spattering tool would be more satisfying than poison. And so I continue in a state of near-sanguinity, rolling with the punches, dreaming of the day when I can properly make my garden. And I miss my little friend and her cheering antics. I nearly added that you can't have everything. Hunfgh!