I'm experiencing a whole new variety of jetlag. Some time between midnight and 4am I'm being woken by the rumbling of my stomach. Not content with the three meals a day I'm already feeding it my body is looking for an extra dinner around 8pm EST. This morning, when it should have been sleeping it craved toast and eggs. We struck a deal. I allowed it a cup of tea, a mandarin orange and a couple of hours of catch-up on the computer. That's the other thing. While I'm traveling life piles up. I probably should get a secretary or something, but secretaries tend to expect a salary and a coffee machine and a twirly chair.

My friend Tone has a neat business idea for people like me; a Virtual Personal Assistant, on call at the end of a computer and paid by the hour. I recently gave it a try and it's a service that really has only one problem: the client who can't let go. That's me. By the time I've explained what I need I'm already thinking, 'I could have done it quicker myself.'
But enough of my time-zone zombie control-freak ramblings. Let me tell you about my diamonds.

My children, aided and abetted by Mr F, sprang a wonderful birthday surprise on me. Diamond earrings. They bought the stones, drew the design and had the earrings made for me by that ace teller of shaggy dog stories and all-round Good Egg and master goldsmith, Peter Page. I've never owned a diamond before. Now I do I quite agree with Marilyn. Twinkle twinkle.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 05:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's November, Thanksgiving, and I write from the Left Coast. I baked apple pie last night, prepped the asparagus. The focus of most people is on the meal, the turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy and cranbery sauce. But after 34 years as a vegetarian, I could care less about turkey, gravy or dressing. The apple pie I don't even eat. And I can't stand mashed potatoes. So what is it that makes this day special?

It's all about the gathering. Not just family, but company. On Thanksgiving, there is always another chair that can be brought to the table. My favorite part is afterwards, while I am doing the dishes, and I listen to everyone talking about their lives, about plans, about the next time we will meet.

As I drove north today I looked around at this Northern Californian beauty, the vineyards turning colors, hawks and egrits on the side of the freeway, "escaped exotics" dotting the hillsides - gum trees, maples, the cloud of European Starlings hovering over the vineyards. Live Oaks, Black Oaks, and White Oaks amidst the Bay Laurel and Digger Pines. And I am reminded of all that I have to be thankful for in this life. Family and friends, in particular.

Thanks again Laurie. And Happy Thanksgiving.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 05:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's something distinctly perverse in the personality of a woman who keeps making travel plans and then hates to leave home. And I am that woman. We have trips in our diary as far ahead as October 2008, and yet here I am, on the eve of our departure, wishing I could just curl up in my basket and growl gently at passers-by.

I think it's just the leaving that gets to me. The actual backing out of the door, convinced I've forgotten something crucial, wound as tight as a watch spring because it's only four hours to take-off. Mr F and I virtually never quarrel but the act of leaving for the airport is guaranteed to produce some low-level snarling.
As in, 'The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, hunh? Is this your idea of a little light reading for the plane?'
Which might be countered by, 'You do realise the plane we're meant to be catching hasn't left England yet? It probably hasn't even left the Boeing factory.'

Anyway, we're off. A brief pit-stop in Dublin and then on to The Great Trough. I don't know why New York is called the Big Apple though I'm sure I could easily find out. But more fitting surely to call it The Obscenely Huge All Day Breakfast? Or the Guaranteed Non-Modified Organically Mulched Carrot? We'll be eating at least two turkey dinners next week and for one of them we have practically a dossier on the creature's background. Who his folks were, where he's been hanging out. I'm going to know more about that turkey than I did about many of the guys I dated.
I just hope the cranberry sauce does him justice.

While I'm gone my worker bees will buzz around learning their lines and stitching on their sequins, Carrie Galbraith will keep my blog alive from California, and our cleaner will come in and fumigate this old dog's basket. But not too thoroughly. Have a good week, y'all.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a real treat yesterday morning. I went to a local elementary school to meet the children who'd been recruited to be the junior chorus in our show next January. I'd forgotten how nice eight year olds are, how bright-eyed and one hundred percent up for everything. They were even enthusiastic about being measured for their tails. But what really struck me was the beautiful atmosphere of the school. An inner city oasis of calm and civility. St Joseph is given them as a model of the qualities they should aim for: gentleness, charity and simplicity. I could have sat there for hours, smelling the beeswax. The last time I was in an elementary school, which I suppose must have been somewhere in England, I was flattened by a tsunami of noise. Those Venetian children are luckier than they know.
I told Mr F, if we have children I want to send them there. But then he reminded me, we already had our children.
Ah, the wisdom of the menopause.

Only a week till we leave for our annual trip to New York and there are some important questions to answer. To use my neat little pull-along bag that corners so well but allows the clothes inside to subside into a crumpled heap, or the nasty green hardtop case that keeps everything neat? To pack the full 8-cylinder, tried-and-tested Beautification Support Kit or buy whatever is on offer at Duane Reed when I get there? And will this be the year when I finally concede that no woman needs to change her necklace daily. Unless perhaps that woman is Joan Collins.

Tomorrow I have to scrub the canary's poop-encrusted perch before he goes to stay with his fastidious Uncle Tony. I tell you, travel's a curse.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Late, late, late. Our broadband has gone into some kind of hibernation and won't wake up. Mr F is in melt-down about it and the words 'banana republic' have been heard. He'll no doubt be ranting about it on his own blog so I'll confine myself to a couple of this week's lovelier Venetian moments.

We went to our favorite pasticceria and I was struck, not for the first time, by the profound reverence Italians bring to the breakfast moment. They stand at the banco and focus, cup in one hand, brioche in the other. They gaze into the schiuma of their cappuccino, sigh, and then slowly sip. The bit I love best is when they run the spoon round the inside of the cup, to capture every last fleck of milky foam. I'm not a cappuccino drinker myself, but when I see that I'm tempted.

Dissolve to several hours later when I had the tricky job of co-ordinating a rehearsal schedule for our pantomime's juvenile chorus. The choreographer can't do Tuesdays or Wednesdays, the juniors have catechism Wednesdays and on the telephone the caretaker of the parish rooms was decidedly hazy about Fridays. Only one thing for it. I went round there.

The parish rooms are wonderful. The 1950s trapped in amber. They are also a refuge for men of a certain age, with time on their hands and perhaps the need to steer clear of She Who Must Be Obeyed until she's finished dusting and mopping.

Fridays in November, it turned out, were not a problem. It was simply that Signor Custode was looking at the diary for December. A little too much grappa after lunch, perhaps. Anyway, my visit was the highlight of his friends' day.
A wild-eyed Englishwoman desperate for a space where six children could dress up as rats and dance.
You couldn't make it up, Luciano. You couldn't make it up. Pass the grappa, mate. And is it me, or is the Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging a bit lopsided?

Posted by Laurie Graham at 04:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)