More or less.

I blinked.

The holiday was over.

So much for a January spent painting and sewing.

Inveigled.

Silly season: not many moments for oneself, or to share with another. This moment twinkles: last Sunday over breakfast, watching the rock pigeons gleaning the lawn. One of them keeled over and stretched out a wing, as far as it could go. He lay there, lazily sunning the tender pink inside, the tiny white feathers.

Vlerke bak. I miss that.

And Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet.

In the library of the long-legged man (well-ordered, comprehensive, quite wonderful), I came across this photograph by Elliot Erwitt:

The Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, San Gimignano,
Tuscany, 1965.

I spent a distant birthday in this place, just off to your left. A theatre troupe would practice on the steps in the afternoons and I'd sit and watch them while rekindling my love for ice cream.

 

I think of places in Italy and associate them with ice cream flavours. Bologna is blackberry, Assisi: candied orange peel and fig. San Gimignano is pistachio, served by a friendly white-haired man with no English, but we understood each other just fine.

 

Before my trip, Aida invited me for breakfast and gave me a copy of Elizabeth David's Of Pageants & Picnics, to read on the plane. I thought of her as I sat on that shell-shaped piazza in Sienna, which is lemon and lime.

After she died, Braam gave me her ice cream machine. Italian: of course!

No instruction booklet.

But research reveals that the machine's paddle is called a dasher. I'm liking that, a lot.

 

Experiment 1: mango/chili/mint

Thrilling. Good.

Experiment 2: avocado/banana/honey

The gelato of my dreams.

There is a freezer in my future.