Ticking Over

When I'm better I'm going to have a cream tea at the NT cafe on Dunwich Cliffs. That's a whole bowl of clotted cream and I'm not sharing. It's not that I'm really craving food as my appetite isn't exactly healthy and I've got plenty of things to choose from to keep me going. Tomorrow the cupboards will be bursting at the seams. It was funny doing a Waitrose online order because, as an aide memoire, they showed what we used to pick a few years ago and it was a real shock, a blast from the past. Funny how an illustrated shopping list can do that. I 'as no voice (old Charles Aznavour joke). It 'as vanished, and it makes me sound much worse than I am. But I'm not there yet, which is sad because Sammy and I were having a free meal at Snape on Saturday followed by a performance of The Turn of the Screw and I've had to cancel. I'm also due to work there on Sunday evening and attend a concert as a punter in the afternoon, Beethoven piano concertos, and these have had to go too. Bad bloody timing.

Several of the members of my Italian class are off to Italy for half term, lucky things. Bologna, Venezia and Siena have been mentioned, and Cagliari in Sardinia. I've been to Italy five times and until I started lessons I didn't know a single word apart from the very basics. How is that possible? All that scope wasted. I spent a month touring around Spain two years ago and at the end of that time could still only manage cerveza, the word for beer. But I had no interest in learning Spanish, and until I started Italian classes had no idea how much I would love the language, how greatly I would enjoy speaking it and understanding it. A slow learner then. But I'm making up for it. Any day now I'm going to carry all my books upstairs and really revise, really get stuck in. I am. No, I am.