“How do I know you’re nice, Virginia?” asked an oily friend the other day. “Because you are the sort of person who lifts worms from roads and relocates them in patches of grass.”
I preened. I pride myself on my sensitivity to members of the animal kingdom. Indeed, I have sometimes privately compared myself to St. Francis. I am, like a lot of oldies, an animal lover. Readers of this column who’ve stuck with me over the last year will remember that I have adopted – and feed - a stray fancy pigeon with a green ring on his foot and a beautiful quiff on the back of his head, who lives on my conservatory roof to this day. I even put up with his poo.
Continue reading ‘Granny Annexe - November 2008′
Oldie October Grannie Annexe
I think it was Shirley Conran who said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom, but I have a new aphorism to spring on you. I’m too old to share a kitchen. You may well wonder what I’m doing sharing a kitchen at my age anyway, but ever since I owned a flat in the sixties, I’ve always had lodgers. When I was broke I stuffed so many of them into every nook and cranny that I often felt like an intruder in my own home – often returning from an evening out to find my kitchen stuffed with young people jabbering in Italian or Korean, staring at me rudely as if I were a gatecrasher.
Continue reading ‘Grannie Annexe - October 2008′