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We're off on holiday in a couple of days and for part of this time we'll be renting a house in England.  The company that arranges the lets sent a note to say that we should telephone a few days before arrival to make arrangements to collect the keys.  I've just spoken to a very jolly lady who was 'terribly pleased' that I'd phoned because she'd been quite worried about how we would manage to communicate given that I was 'abroad, so to speak'.  Well, it's not 'so to speak' , it really is abroad.  Anyway, I managed to reassure her that this part of Europe was fully immersed in the 21st century regarding telephones and email and so she's going to tell Gail that they don't need to worry anymore.  She was such a nice lady that I couldn't even manage the tiniest bit of sarcasm in my voice.  Not even when she said that I ought to bring a windcheater and a warm sweater because you could never be sure about the weather.

Before I go on holiday I always tend to clean my house partly because it's nice to come back to a bit of order but also because I can't bear for my bossy neighbour who looks after things when I'm away to realise quite how slatternly I can be.  Once again I was attempting to organise our possessions and moaning to myself about the lack of suitable storage and how my life could be transformed by better storage facilities and thus glossing over the fact that I'm just rather untidy when I decided to get rid of a whole load of things that haven't been used since I moved here over a year ago.  One of the things that I finally got rid of was my mother's handbag which has been moved from Scotland to England and then twice within Europe.  For some reason I couldn't quite bring myself to throw it away despite having disposed of most of her other possessions.  Her glasses were in there along with 2 cotton hankies, a library card, a powder compact, several pens, and the odd bits of rubbish that accumulate at the bottom of handbags. 

I'm not sure why I felt quite so precious about the handbag but in some way I felt that it would be disrespectful to throw it away but at the same time I couldn't imagine anyone else having it although I didn't mind giving away much of her clothes and jewelry.  There's something quite personal about a handbag but I don't understand why. It's mattered to me for years - she died 8 years ago - and I'd periodically mumble something about how I ought to get rid of Mum's bag and my husband would say that there was no rush and so it would just sit there, under my desk in the study in England.  Then it was in the spare room in our next place and then here it was put on a shelf in the cellar until I finally realised that it is just a bag. 

Cranberry and walnut muffins

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For the sake of mine and Mr Pork's sanity I need to find myself a long-term project given that it is very unlikely that I'm going to get anything like decent paid work in this country.  Although I teach a little English I cannot do too many hours because of a combination of tedious government bureaucracy and the slave-owner attitude of the language schools.  Essentially, self-employment in this country is rather tricky unless you know that you are going to earn above a certain amount that will at least cover your health insurance.  High unemployment is a feature of where we live and we also have an enormous student population who tend to take the unskilled, part-time posts that I might think of applying for.  It would be impossible for me to work within my own occupation in this country because of a number of reasons: it is largely language (and to some extent culturally) dependent; I haven't worked in my own field for five years and have thus dropped off one of the registers and would need to do a considerable amount of work to bring myself back to a state where I would be fit to practice.

At the moment I do some voluntary work for a charity that provides food to poor people and I quite enjoy it but I don't enjoy it enough to do any more of it than I do already which is one day per week.  It's physically hard work as well as being mentally stimulating but it can be enormously stressful.  I am considering looking at some extra, different voluntary work that would allow me to widen my social network and also further improve my language skills.  In some areas my language skills are excellent - all the food words, for instance - but there is a set routine to what I do which means that I'm extremely proficient in some situations but still pretty bad in others.  I try to vary what I say but in the end there are only so many ways to say 'what type of bread do you want?' or 'would you like some lettuce?'

Someone suggested to me that I should write a book about how to cope as a trailing spouse (I didn't invent that term, by the way) and Mr Pork agreed.  My reaction to that is that it would be interesting and I'd quite like to but I'm not sure that I'm necessarily the Poster Girl for trailing spouses given that my own experiences haven't been particularly positive and that I'm sitting here five years down the line asking for help from my imaginary chums on t'internet.  I also don't know how to go about it - I mean, how to market myself to agents/publishers.  I don't see myself as having marketable skills in this area because I haven't got a body of written work behind me to say that I can do this. (I've only tried my hand at fiction and not got particularly far)  So, dear internet chums - is this even worth thinking about?  Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?  I promise to read everything and take it on board and not dismiss anything without giving it some consideration.  I won't say 'yes, but' or put up arguments as to why things wouldn't work.  I don't want people to be polite and say that I could do this when they don't think that I can.  Please drop any ideas as to what I could do into the box and also any advice, information or anything about the book idea.

Ta. x

1.  Should you ever find yourself wondering how you would look if you drew the loose folds of skin on your face back towards the neck area and then turned your head slightly to the side to get the profile picutre, can I suggest that you do this in the privacy of your own bathroom with the door locked, and padlock added to be on the safe side.  Ladies' rooms in restaurants and cafes may try to lull you into a false sense of security by putting soft towels, soft lighting and pretty soaps around the place but you'll find that none of this helps when the two 19 year-olds march in at the moment that you're admiring the firm jaw you once owned around 1987. 

2.  Dignity can never be scraped from the floor of the ladies' room.

What did you learn in kindergarten that you wish you did a better job of applying to the way you live your life today?

that throwing a fucking great wendy of a tantrum may not be big, clever or grown-up but it doesn't half feel good.  Hang on - you mean a better job of applying to the way you live your life today?  Right - as you were.

Salads.  What do you about getting the best dressed salad?  I've become a bit poncy about the old olive oil and worry that I'm going to end up spending more on that than I do on wine.  But given that one has forked out a fair bit for something that's been hand-pressed by virgins in the Tuscan sunshine and then bottled lovingly by pixies is it fair to start interfering with it?

If the paragraph before was poncy then now comes the screaming middle-class bit - my normal salad dressing would consist of one of my many vinegars - let's say an apple balsamic for the sake of the Good Food Guide.  Anyway, I'd do three times the amount of oil to vinegar and there would be some mashed garlic, a bit of shallot and some fancy mustard as well.  Then I'd whisk it in a big bowl and add the salad to that and then toss (with my aged,  Native American , hand-turned, elm salad servers). 

Then I put the fish fingers on the plate and drizzle the baked beans across. 

But seriously.  Any good salad dressing recipes would be much appreciated.

...to think that someone who is a friend of a friend, but who has my main email address, has absolutely no right to pass my email address onto her friend, who I don't know at all, who then spams me for a bloody book launch in Paris?  And the friend doesn't even have the brains to use BCC when using it. 

I'm just being a miserable old bag, aren't I?

Right.  Back to my corner.

It's a beautiful hot, sunny day here and the department store is giving away cologne-drenched tissues as part of a promotion.  And probably to keep the scent of stale sweat at bay too.  Smelling the tissue took me back to being a child, to the Xmases where I'd given both my mum and my nanny this very same cologne as a gift.  My mother used either this cologne or lavender water.  She would put a splash of cologne on her hankie and then tuck it into her watch strap and the scent would drift around her.  One hot summer's day, a journey to somewhere, maybe the seaside, I can't remember exactly, but we'd been away.  We were on the bus going home, I was hot and fractious and complaining about something or other.  She made me have a drink of water and laid my head on her lap and she smoothed the hankie dampened with cologne across my forehead.  I slept and woke later when it was dark and I could smell my mum and knew that everything was okay.  It made me really happy to smell it again.

The other thing that is making me deliriously happy is my google home page which I've decorated with Edward Monkton and his Pig of Happiness.  I am completely in love with The Madness Hamsters. 

Porkette - aged 6.

I'd just like to place it on record that I'm feeling brilliantly happy and enthusiastic at the moment.  The sun is shining, I've got a house and a garden, I've painted a picture that actually looks like the thing I started painting, my courgettes are showing little yellow buds, my nasturtiums are sprouting, I'm going walking today with my colleagues and then we're going to end the day eating and drinking in a pub.  I've got friends here and far away, I have people to talk to and people who listen to me and I'm going to make the most of it.  I have a good man who loves me and who spent his lunchbreak yesterrday choosing and buying CDs for me because he wanted me to have some new music. 

I will ignore the fact that my geranium seems to be resisting my efforts to keep it alive.  I can't have everything.