Saturday, June 15

We got up and breakfasted and noticed that the weather had turned very summery.

Just before midday we left for the British Embassy where the summer fete will take place. We got there in time to join qa slow meandering queue to get inside.

Inside the embassy we see a small band of Signal Corps reservists playing what sounds like something by Glenn Miller. We walk around looking for people that we might know, to the sound of brass renditions of dancehall hits from the 1940s.

We will spend some time with Catherine who has packed up her house and will leave for Sardinia tomorrow. Her husband left her after twenty eight years a couple of years ago, and now she has decided to put her fluent Italian to some use qand start a new life. She will introduce us to her children, one of who studies in Edinburgh and one of whom soon will.

We will meet Tom and Maisa and talk with the Ambassador’s wife and Chris, the somewhat wild head of the British Women’s Association. Irma will somehow get invited to join and the promise of shepherd’s pie at the meetings will prove more than enough to get her to say yes.

We will stop at Prisma on the way home and then walk to Plantagen to buy bushes which we will spend the rest of the afternoon planting.

In the evening we will watch a Swedish thriller that seems to score very highly on the graphic brutality dial, and Donnie Brasco, the Johnny Depp / Al Pacino film that I can never watch because I can’t stop the feeling that, look at this, I can see Johnny Depp and Al Pacino acting in a movie.