writer's moll

I’m treading around my loved one carefully today, as yesterday he caught me ‘wasting’ his precious cheddar cheese on a recipe for a lunchtime guest. His bottom lip positively trembled, but he manfully pulled himself together and by the end of the day was almost himself again.

When my son Rob was diagnosed with cancer and had to have his tongue taken out last September, it felt like a stalker had come into his life. He’s fought off the first attack but now he'll always be on the run - once a stalker takes an interest in you, he doesn’t give up easily and though you may move house, you're always waiting for that knock on the door that says he’s found you again. Well, he has. New symptoms have meant PET and MRI scans this week for Rob and now we must wait while the doctors assess them and come up with a strategy which might put this loathsome creature away for life.

When someone says “I love them to bits”, like a grammar rule, it must always be followed by BUT – well this is no different. So, those French, love them to bits, BUT oh those public servants, who have their jobs for life… We went to the railway station in Nice to book a trip to Rome for a few days. At one end is a large reservation hall where a woman at the front gives you a numbered ticket and you wait for one of the dozen or so information windows to become available, but she said 'no more tickets', nothing more, just 'no more tickets'. Like obedient children we walk away and then say ‘hang on, what are we supposed to do then’, so go back and this time she tells us the important bit and sends us to the ticket desk at the other end of the station, where we find a notice telling us that this is only for trains leaving that day. Back to the reservation hall where the woman repeats the instruction as though you were a new customer - no extra help, no apology so back again where we spend 20 minutes in a queue and the woman at the window doesn’t bat an eyelid at our request. Oh so it isn’t just for trains that day? – it would have been nice to know that earlier. But this is par for the course apparently – if you want a permit for something, you might need documents A and B which you produce, only to be told that you haven’t got document C. You protest that you weren’t told you needed document C which gets you a shrug as a response plus the repeated demand for said document. You bring back document C and are told you haven’t got document D …..