HOME TERRITORY

HIGHLIGHTS OF JOURNEY:

None, not counting arriving home in one piece as opposed to Davy Jones' locker, always a plus in these exhausting days of terrorist threats and having to take your stupid shoes off and getting your Lily of the Valley hand cream confiscated. It is an absolute miracle, no exaggeration, that I've made as many transatlanic crossings as I have in the past two years without being arrested for calling some jobsworth an asshole. But Jesus H, it's all such a waste of everyone's time. My friend Alain, having breezed through security, once flew across the country unwittingly carrying a matt knife/box cutter in his briefcase but there's me with my "I LOVE NY" snowflake Christmas tree ornament that I'd just bought two minutes before at Hudson News, twenty feet away, and getting the third degree and twelve supervisors over to examine it and wipe it with pieces of explosive-sensing cloth and finally not being allowed to take it on the plane. Assholes. As I said. 

In fact the only possible highlight to this enervating and thoroughly unenjoyable experience in 2014 called Air Travel, was paying $70 each to access JFK's Virgin Upper Class lounge on Premium Economy tickets, and eventually being apprised that since the credit card company never rang them back, at the front desk, our lounge access was gratis, compliments of Virgin. Thank you, Richard Branson, who I in fact kissed one day at Arnold House School Sports Day (our sons attended the same school): a) to tell him what a great airline he had and how crap TWA and BA and American and United were in comparison, but also; b) to rescue him from another parent, John Edstrom, who bored for England, to the extent that if any of us school pick-up mother's saw him waiting in front of the gate we didn't get out of our cars. 
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THINGS FOUND AT HOME IN THE UK:

Flowers, that Alex's girlfriend bought; a freshly hoovered and Windolened VW Golf; fresh sheets on the bed, not counting one pillowcase which looks like Mabel might have christened with a muddy paw; an un-watered garden and hence, some major surgical repair required with secateurs and Miracle Gro (and a few tears) ; 4 vegetable and fruit refrigerator bins filled with wet, decayed matter; every bath towel in the laundry basket or on a chair, damp. And that's about it. Which is not bad, considering a brother-in-law and a son were in charge, neither of whom have ever managed to grasp the finer points of Good Housekeeping despite lengthy instruction over the years. Mike has now had almost 80 years to figure it all out, and never will, and once used my good paella pan as a wok and ruined it but don't get me started. Alex is, however, better and better each time. Denis does not get completely off the hook here either, despite being with me, since I recognized some of the decaying vegetable matter in the fridge drawers as items I had bought in July, when they'd looked a lot better, and which could have been thrown out prior to his departure. I'm just saying.  
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BECKET NEWS:

None. I bought Peg an iPad two days before we left, loaded it with pics, set up her Facebook Page and website address, and Denis', loaded her Facetime favourites (me me me), and gave her two lessons, each time deciding after about ten minutes that I wanted to kill her because she couldn't master a simple movement such as putting one's finger on a fucking screen, she kept using the tip of her nail, like she's tapping out Morse Code. Finally I got a manicure scissors and cut the bloody thing off (nail, not finger). She still had trouble. Told her to pretend she's being fingerprinted. She said her hand didn't bend that way. I grabbed her finger and physically pressed it on the iPad, achieving partial success, except she kept sticking her elbows out like she was imitating a chicken. The object of the whole iPad business, which I had thought a complete brainwave, was to give her an easy not to mention FREE way of calling me, plus be able to look at pics and read (and enlarge the print on) her website. And see what her fans write on Facebook. I left Terri, who is an iPad pro, with instructions to persevere. I think it's safe to assume not a huge amount of progress has been made since I have been home three days now and so far not been Facetimed.

I did, of course, purchase an iPad with 3GB of space instead of the basic 16 on the off chance, however slim, that Peg looks at it one more time before relegating it to the disaster area on her desk and that's that, it never surfaces again. Until I organize the next excavation of the area, uncover it---and whip it for myself.