TIME FOR AN UPDATE

Five months between blogs is too long ... I started this blog with good intentions and things are going from bad to worse! Since my blog on the frozen wastes of St. Petersburg in February, G and I have done a fair bit of travelling and have contributed a mega carbon footprint to the Planet which is nothing to be proud of ... we returned to Brussels last night from Ireland and I am definitely not moving from the house in the forseeable future - even my wee Scottish gentleman is wondering who I am.

After our rapid and sad trip down to the Pyrenées to attend my ex-husband's funeral, we have been to England to assist at the wedding of G's son in Somerset and celebrate my mum's 80th birthday, we spent ten days down in Brittany near Quimper which was lovely - lots of exploring, too many crêpes and masses of seafood and we have just returned from ten days in Co. Mayo in Ireland - a country that I have never before visited. A wonderfully wild place with some of the best salmon fishing in the world, miles and miles of peat bogs, lakes and lashings of rain! It is green - and the 'Emerald Isle' suits its name perfectly. The Irish are very charming and welcoming and very easy to get chatting to (especially over a few pints of Guinness!) although I found the accent a little difficult at times. We had hoped to do quite a lot of walking over there but two days before leaving I fell on the garden steps and managed to turn my left thigh and my right foot into a purple/green/yellow rainbow, so the first few days I was hobbling around feeling sorry for myself. So instead of walking we drove around the whole of Co. Mayo, visiting ruins of churches, abbeys, peat bogs, the wild Altantic coast so that I could get a feel of the country.



G went fishing one day and returned with a (rather small) brown trout that we hadn't the heart to eat and which I hope is not still sitting in th hotel 'fridge! We spent a morning in Ballana watching the salmon starting to make their way upstream which was most impressive - there wasn't enough water in the River Moy (despite the rain) so they were congregating in the pools under the weir, waiting for the water level to rise - I have never seen so many salmon leaping out of the water and we witnessed a guy catching a salmon which I have never seen before - he put it back in the river as he normally catches about six a day, so salmon is a rather boring food for him!

And now we are back to the tropical heat of Brussels - today it has been 30 degrees which after Co. Mayo and its copious rain is quite an impressive temperature. Wee Angus has been collected from the kennels, happy and content to see us and smelling like nothing on earth, so it's bath time for him tomorrow before we all pass out!

And the best thing that has happened to me in the last couple of months? Guess ... ? G asked this grumpy old woman if she wanted to marry him, and she accepted! So a wedding probably in December here in Brussels and all our decomposed families are suddenly in the process of being recomposed - wonderful!