Hi !

 Meanwhile, way over the Pond in super-sunny California our ever-wonderful Katie has discovered my secret US business venture … 

Many thanks, Katie for a fit of the giggles - and I'll be pronouncing it DRAAANKS! from now on.

Transports of Delight

Yesterday, my kindly postie left me a long-awaited package and I must confess to being utterly delighted with its contents.
I have spent the past year amazed; not that so many of my friends have had books published, but at the astonishingly high quality of those books. First came Margaret's hilarious and touching "The Goddess Lounge", then Petrea's brilliant "Camelot and Vine", every page of which left me thinking "This woman can really WRITE" and feeling slightly guilty that I had not expected that from a friend.

Norm (Mr.M) of course is a long established and far-famed poet, music and architecture critic, jazz historian and just an all round brilliant guy, and Katherine now has a list of books as long as your arm (though Poems From The Battlefield holds a special place in my heart).

My oldest and bestest blogpal Robyn has written a slow-burn masterpiece of American Realism that still awaits a lucky publisher, our Lynn has a startlingly good book in the same situation, Vanda has a whole bunch of books published (which I love but which are written under a pseudonym and kept off here to protect the innocent) and even my dear neighbour Gerry is in on the act, having spent the past four years crafting a tautly plotted and beautifully written thriller set in Berlin (where he lived and worked at the end of the Cold War) and which we sent off to his agent last week and toasted with rather too much wine and grappa.

And now here comes Sara's masterful survey of the history of the American steamboat (one of which she used to own), a subject that has fascinated me since I was a little boy lost in Mark Twain.

Meticulously researched by a woman who really knows - and loves - her subject …

 … written in a gorgeous prose style filled with the fabulous imagery of someone whose life has been spent as a professional artist and photographer (and blogger) …

… and lavishly illustrated with maps, paintings and glorious period photographs, this is a gem of a book and I am loving every minute of reading it. It shall sit happily between Twain's Autobiography and his Life on the Mississippi.
A hearty cheer, too, for Shire Books for the extremely high quality of reproduction and layout.

The season of summer reading is upon us so follow the links and go shopping:

Sara's "Steamboats - Icons of America's Rivers"

Petrea's "Camelot and Vine"

Margaret's "The Goddess Lounge"

Katherine's Amazon page

Norm's "No Wrong Notes" (Amazon keep muddling him up with a similarly named chef so you have to filter through to find the poetry and prose).

Robyn, Lynn and Gerry will no doubt follow and Vanda remains a secret delight all her own.
I'm going to have to learn how to write so I can play with you guys.

Where In The World?

Spring hit town yesterday (just for the day; it's going to return to torrential rain tomorrow) so Lynn and I went out for a walk.
This is where we went.
Pretty, huh?
More later.
Toodle pip.

A Hidden Jewel

How Brontë is that?

Lynn's been over here on the correct side of the country for Christmas with her parents and yesterday I stole her away for a meandering drive out to the coast.
On our way, we swung by Hemblington; a tiny hamlet-ette only a couple of miles from my house, as one of Lynn's ancestors hails from there.

The hamlet is still there; a cluster of modern houses snuggled around a few mediæval thatched cottages, but the place had been emparked in the eighteenth century so the original village has long disappeared, demolished by the rapacious landowner who evicted the entire population, replaced them with far more profitable sheep and built his manor house by the church, which now stands over a mile from the modern hamlet.
While there are myriad mediæval halls and merchants' houses littering the local countryside, many dating back pre-twelfth century in part, I know of no complete working class house from before around 1400 anywhere around here.
Here in east Norfolk, we're on glacial chalk and there is no natural, workable building stone (hence the round flint towers of Saxon times before the Normans floated Caen stone over here on barges to build the Castle and Cathedral) and most folk lived in one room hovels built around a very basic timber frame. These frames were infilled with wattle and daub (wattle being the young growth from pollarded willows woven into basketwork panels); the local daub being of clunch (chalk rubble), mixed with clay mud, dung and urine, and "puddled" (trodden into a squish) before being thrown onto the wattles. The outside was weatherproofed with slaked lime and the roofs were thatched. They needed rebuilding every generation so none have survived (other than the timber frames with later brick infill).

All Saints Church took some finding, as it's cut off from the hamlet, but after a dead end and a muddy track we eventually found it, way out in the middle of nowhere and to my unalloyed delight discovered it is a virtually unspoiled, ninth/tenth century Saxon round towered flint church … a rarity indeed, even in Norfolk where we have more of them than the rest of the world combined.
I thought I knew all the Saxon churches around here, so finding this one so close to home was a wonderful surprise.
Anyhoo … looking at the photo above (and ignoring the madwoman): the tower is ninth or tenth century, as is the greater part of the nave. The only surviving Saxon windows are the bell-frame windows at the top of the tower. After the Norman conquest, when the church was already old, the new French landowner added a chancel (the bit on the right) in the twelfth century Early English style (the first, simple, gothic style windows you can see there). A later Plantagenet landowner replaced the Saxon windows in the nave using the lovely Decorated Gothic style (thirteenth century), and much later, the landowner who emparked the village added the knapped flint crosses to the porch and replaced the thatched roof with pantiles.

Inside, however, was another revelation. Hoo boy!

The Victorians - those criminal desecrators of all things tasteful - systematically whitewashed over every mediæval wall painting in every church in the country during their dreadful reign of cultural terror in the nineteenth century. Too primitive; too rude; too humorous for the Calvinistic Taliban.
In the last three decades, a renaissance has been under way and - very gradually - those original glories of gothic period church wall paintings have been painstakingly uncovered in a few remote churches.
 Here in Hemblington is the finest I have ever seen: Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child, surrounded by other Bible stories.
When this was painted, Mass was a Latin only service and the "mystery" of the Church was maintained by keeping the population completely ignorant of what the Bible was about (no English language version was available until hundreds of years afterwards). So to educate the peasantry, stories from Scripture were painted on the walls; our great religious cultural history wilfully destroyed by the ignorant Victorians.
This example is - judging by the style of contemporary illuminated manuscripts - probably original to the church and therefore may even be as early as the ninth or tenth century.
Wow!

Here's the thirteenth century font, repainted in its original colours. I've fallen in love with this little church and will be back in better weather to take more photos for you.

I'll leave you with Lynn, delighted to be sitting (and shivering) in the very pews her ancestor would have known all too well.
Toodle pip from Very Olde England!

First Lunch of the Year

Following on from yesterday's "Last Lunch of the Year" post where Lynn and I ate in the new Patisserie Valerie in Norwich and thoroughly enjoyed it, the new year finds me sitting in the same seat in the same café with our Peahen, enjoying much the same yumminess.

We'd also enjoyed the morning's New Year's Day Organ Recital at Norwich Cathedral.
Here's a little taster. Please excuse my shaky camerawork.


Happy New Year, folks!

Now home again and enjoying the Pasadena Rose Parade live on a KTLA5 link Petrea posted.
Mmm … cheerleaders … Yay!

Last Lunch of the Year

One last post of 2012:
Our lovely Lynn is over on the correct side of the country for Christmas with her parents and that's as good a reason as any to misuse the word 'party' as a verb.
So we went to try out the new Patisserie Valerie that's recently emerged from the cocoon of Clark's shoe shop betwixt the Market and the Castle in Norwich.

It's been beguiling me for a couple of weeks now, with its pretty waitresses and comfy chairs and Parisian style cakes in the window.
Who do I know who likes cake?
Aha …

Anyhoo … Other than Breakfast Club, any visitors meeting me in the city are now likely to get dragged inside Patisserie Valerie. It feels genuinely Parisian (crowded, chatty - but not overly noisy - filled with yumminess) but is not so dark and dingy as a genuine Parisian café so you can actually see what you're eating and who you're talking to.

Review time:
A matching pair of Croques Champignons … perfectly delicious, with a bonus point for the excellence of the salad dressing.
Black Americano and tall mineral water (still) … as good as anywhere else that serves illy, which is pretty darned good.
My dessert was an espresso and pair of mini-macarons (pistachio) … scrummy.
Lynne's chocolate cake and cappuccino looked pretty good, too.
Add in a fruit juice for Lynn and two obscenely mouthwatering cakes in pretty boxes tied with ribbon to take home for her Mum and Dad and the whole lot came in at a very affordable price, including a big tip for the excellent (attractive, polite, attentive but not obtrusive) waitress.

More places like this, please, Norwich. I'll be back for lunch on Saturday.
Tomorrow I'm meeting Peahen and friends for the New Year organ recital in Norwich Cathedral.
Hope you all have an unconscionably spiffy 2013.
See you there.

Wednesday Window On A Thursday - Lulu

Meanwhile … in Burlington Arcade …
"Hey, HWDB! D'you think the girls would like those handbags with the lips?"
Jules considers spending PNG's entire gross national product on two handbags.

Yikes.

Paradise Comes To Town

Hokay … Time to reveal which of our original Blogville neighbours turned up for lunch with Old Dive yesterday.

Here's a hint: if you live here (and she does), where on earth would you go if you wanted to take a break from Paradise?

Yep: you got it: London … In November … Cold, rainy, windy and about as far from Paradise as it's possible to get.
So a big welcome to the Frozen North for the lovely Jules and the almost equally lovely "He Who Doesn't Blog" from Rabaul Daily Photo … who has a name now, but will be referred to today in his original blog ID as HWDB.

And here they are, shivering in front of the Parasite House, having left Paradise in 32 degree Celsius temperatures not long before and arrived in 32 degree Fahrenheit temperatures, well wrapped up against the London weather.
At any other time of year, the bridge over the lake in St.James's Park is a beautiful and romantic place to meet; in November, it's just cold, wet, covered in dead leaves and swan crap and mercifully devoid of tourists … well, apart from this splendid pair.

Here's Jules being Jules. She's even more fun in person than she is on her blog and Facebook. She came bearing gifts, both beautiful and bizarre … more on that another day, however.

Christmas in Paradise and Christmas in the arcades of Piccadilly are two quite different affairs, so it's nice to do both (this weekend I'm buying a lottery ticket as it's the only chance I've got of a return visit).

HWDB - as well as being witty, charming and doing an astonishingly spectacular coffee-juggling, erupting volcano impersonation, is also eagle-eyed; he spotted the PNG High Commission which I've walked past a thousand times without realising it's there.
Home from home.

Jules and HWDB are here for only a short time before flying off to warmer climes; this time Barcelona, where I'm sure they'll have a fabulous time (as well as recover from the cold).

So thank you both for a really great fun visit and for my fantastic prezzies. Have a great time in Catalunya and remember to change out of your arctic clothes before getting off the plane back in Paradise.
I love it when blogs collide.

Photographers: Beware of Pigeons

Back in London today for some meetings; one of which will hopefully be a lot more fun than the others. At lunchtime, on the very spot from which I took this photo of Whitehall - complete with speeding pigeon - I shall be meeting one of our original Blogville residents (sadly no longer blogging and sorely missed).
I wonder who it shall be …

Will Knit For Breakfast

Our own very lovely Peahen joined us for breakfast this morning (and second breakfast and then elevenses … the table had already been cleared twice by the time I took the photo). She's just finished the knitting Olympics and is now … er … knitting.

We enjoyed way too many coffees, a great catch-up session and some shopping and then a very therapeutic ranty moan in the Apple Store (one of my favourite Saturday pastimes) about Apple's dumbing down and lack of support for professional users with each new and increasingly mobile-oriented OS and the fact that Pea has to sell her apps exclusively through Apple's Apps Store and they charge her THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT on every sale!
Apple are turning into Microsoft and I do enjoy venting my righteous spleen at their long-suffering staff members whenever I am in there. They are so nice and they always nod and agree with me. The fact that I spend all my money in there no doubt makes them more tolerant.

Anyhoo … thanks for a fab fun morning, Pea. Give my love to the family, and mum says she loves your hair like that.
xx

Oh, We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside

Just to bring you up to speed now that Blogger has managed to get its trousers on the right way round:
Our Lynn from Cheltenham Daily Photo is staying in Norfolk for a bit. She's caring for her Mum and Dad; her Mum's been ill and her Dad's been in hospital for an op, but thankfully they are both on the mend.
Anyhoo, Lynn came for three days and has been stuck here for weeks, so we've been having some fun together (Lynn's joined the Saturday Breakfast Gang) and enjoying little excursions to distract her from worries and chores.

As for where we went last weekend, Vanda suggested a circus and Petrea a gay bar and I must confess this place combines the two. For we return to the heart of kitsch-crappy, tourist-tacky cultural desolation that is Great Yarmouth.

Ah, tristesse …
When I was a wee laddie, this beach at this time of the year was so packed with people that you had to tread on them to reach the sea.

No takers for the deck chairs

And only a single … er … sunbather, avoiding the rays.




What on earth has happened to the traditional seaside holiday? Where are the queues waiting to use the beach huts?

Whither the kids clamouring for their turn at the telescope?

Aha! Some sign of life! A busy shopgirl rushed off her feet by the crowds fighting to purchase buckets, spades and windmills.

Sqwawk!

At least there are fresh doughnuts. Yummy!
More from Lynn and myself later.
Oh, and please come to the beach for your holidays and liven the place up. It's like a bloody morgue down here.

Lunch With Lucio

And so to the Tate for a long awaited meeting with international man of mystery, intellectual culture vulture and prince of erudition, Lucio.

Click on us. We get bigger!
And note the Turneresque light.
Entirely deliberate – Ha!

It turns out that not only is he devilishly handsome but also completely charming, utterly delightful company and great fun, too. I can't wait for our next meeting.
For any who may not know and are of an artistic temperament, Lucio's main blog is over here. It now features some lovely photographs from his recent European travels.

Anyhoo, when at the Tate one must look round, and look round we did (after enjoying lunch, which Lucio insisted on paying for, bless him).
First up is a big Hoorah! At last, after a two year absence, my favourite Millais paintings - Ophelia and Maryann - are once more hung together in the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery so we started there. You can get right up close to these paintings and wonder at their luminescence and detail. Millais painted them into thick wet white ground with a tiny sable brush and managed about a square inch a day.

The Tate is always swapping things around just to confuse me. Yesterday my favourite Bacon (Study For Three Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion) was out on tour but there was plenty new to gawp at, including the BIG Hockneys in their own room. Well impressive!

The spooky Cholmondeley Sisters were there, bonkers and sad as ever. I always stop off to say hello to them. Also Robyn's infamous man with no trousers.

But the main reason we were there was the big 'Turner And The Masters' show.
Go see it. But more importantly, go see what they've done to fill the gaps taken by the paintings in the main show.
By removing all of the big early classical scenes from the Clore Gallery (the home of the Turner Collection) to put with the Titians and Canalettos et al in the big show, those lovely people at the Tate have unwittingly given us an even better show.
And it's FREE!

The Clore Gallery is currently filled with room after room of late and unfinished Turner masterworks; the insane, passionate orgasms of light that most ascribe to failing sight and galloping senile dementia.
A breathtaking display that is easily the best art exhibition anywhere on the planet this year.

Lucio and I were transfixed. We were like kids in a candy shop. Everywhere we looked was a masterpiece of colour and light: Turner at the pinnacle of his power. We stalked from room to room stopping to gasp in awe at the sheer numbers and mind-blowing intensity of emotion on display, getting increasingly worked up in our own passionate enthusiasm (lots of splendid arm-waving and expostulation - yay).

Whole months worth of glorious Turner sunsets are on display that have never been gathered together before. Getting up close and personal we were overwhelmed by the sheer insanity of his palette knife work. Lucio said that he was painting not light but luminescence and he was right. And Turner was painting it in a way that nobody had done before, or indeed since.
At the centre of a massive sunset, the very last stroke of one painting was the sun itself. We could see how carefully he had mixed the color; an intense custardy, egg-yolk yellow infused with tints of crimson; but then he had simply thrown it onto the canvas with one big splat of the palette knife. And it was perfect! Such passion, such confidence were awe-inspiring. And to paint this way in the 1830s, long before Monet seems amazing to us. Dozens of mad, bright, brilliant canvases assailed us everywhere we looked.

One painting in particular I had never seen in the Clore or indeed anywhere else. Its combination of fine detail and unchained chaos gives the lie to theories that his later works were due to failing eyesight or the onset of madness. He could still paint in the classical style but he could also unleash himself in a frenzy of pure, undiluted passion.
It is a frankly astonishing painting.
Only a few years after Joseph Wright of Derby painted many a similar scene Turner let himself loose on the hellfires of the Industrial Revolution. The inside of an iron foundry at night, filled with BIG light and dark, massive contrasts of flame and deep shadow.
Down at the bottom right hand corner, taking up no more than a quarter of the painting, tiny, highly detailed figures of steelworkers huddle in the dark, dwarfed by mighty machinery, massive cogs and wheels churning and hammering in the darkness.
But where, in a Joseph Wright painting the crucible itself should be, in Turner's vision all Hell has broken loose … Dante's Inferno has come to life and leaps out of the canvas at us in an apocalyptic fiery furnace of coruscating light, molten steel, sparks and flame.
After such careful and lifelike rendering of the tiny figures cowering in the corner, the rest of that mad, incredible painting looks for all the world as if Turner has attacked the canvas with fistsful of lead white, chrome yellow and cadmium red, hurling great wads of thick impasto, shards of light, explosions of blinding colour at the surface before diving in there himself to attack it in a thrashing frenzy of intense screaming passion, a desperate fight to the death to render light and colour more intensely than the eye can ever see; smearing the glistening oils, slashing and stabbing with palette knife, clawing with fingers and nails (you can still see every mark), shrieking, possesed by madness and desire until at last collapsing, sated, gasping and spent on the floor beneath what is inalienably, even today, a shocking, daring, modern and completely fucking bonkers masterpiece.
Of course I could be wrong, but that's how it looks like he painted it.

I'm going back on Monday to see it again. Woohoo!

And that is only one of dozens of astonishing canvases on display. They won't be there much longer; when the big exhibition is over they'll be hidden away in the basement once more. Maybe in a decade or two, if someone has the vision and the money, such a glorious display of late Turners will be put together in a big, blockbuster exhibition. But don't wait up. It is there right now and it is free! Both Lucio and myself were privileged to catch such a magnificent moment. You'd be mad to miss it yourself.

So steal, maim, kill if you have to but get there!

Toodle Pip!

Katie And Dive Do London Pt.7

Oh, woe is me!
Alas and alack for today is the final post in our Katie series and I have to bite back the tears as she heads off to Paris and eventually back to San Francisco and home to Berkeley, taking the sunshine - and a little piece of the hearts of everyone who has met her - back to that beautiful city on the bay.

Yesterday left us walking hastily away from my office toward the river, where we find Tate Britain, our last gallery of the day.

Much to Katie's bemusement, Martin Creed's latest work is still going on in the main hall (and will be for a few weeks more yet).
"Work no.850" involves an athlete running the length of the gallery every thirty seconds.
Supposedly some kind of link to the 2012 Olympics and the silly idea of making it a "Cultural Olympics" to draw in more tourists, the first day saw all the famous athletes and medal winners from Beijing hurtling headlong past the press cameras; now we are down to the hopefuls for 2012 and the gallery is considerably less crowded, so we are disappointed in our expectation of seeing a runner smashing full tilt into a crowd of visitors.
Hey ho.

We are really here to see the "late works" room in the Turner galleries but why waste the opportunity of having a good poke around?
Aha!
Katie immediately spots a mosaic and - as photography is not allowed, we sneak off non-flash photos when nobody is looking.

I make a point of introducing Katie to the creepy Cholmondeley Sisters, one of the strangest and most disturbing paintings ever; and hanging next to it of course, Robyn's famous "That man's got no trousers on!" painting.

Millais' Mariana and Ophelia - which usually hang side by side - are out on loan at the moment, which is a pity as they are my companions on many a rainy lunchtime, but there is plenty more to marvel at.
For one thing, Katie has never seen any Gwen John paintings until today.

After a good look around we head for the wing that houses the Clore Gallery where the Turners are kept.
Upstairs there is a cute little interactive exhibition illustrating Turner's techniques and use of colour and a room full of paper and pencils where you are invited to copy Turner's drawings and display them.

Here is Katie on the upstairs balcony above the main Turner room, trying to stay still as it is pretty dark in here and the exposure takes ages without flash.

This is a little bit of my favourite room at Tate Britain. It is hung with a selection of Turner's late and unfinished "mad" paintings; those glorious attempts of the batty, half-blind old codger to "paint light".

Everybody who visits London should see this room and marvel at the sheer intensity of Turner's vision.
Unfortunately we didn't have time when Mme and MB visited, but I recall "Eustacia", Elizabeth and mum resting their weary legs, flaked out on that seat while Robyn and myself explored the paintings and shared a little bit of the magic of this wonderful place.

And now it is "chucking out time". Katie and I have outstayed our welcome and we exit the gallery beside the Thames as the late afternoon sun glints off the Spook House (MI6 HQ; somewhere in there is Miss. Moneypenny's office).

Looking east, the Eye is bathed in warm sunshine and the river - for once - looks something other than its usual fœtid brown.
It is such a lovely evening that we decide to wander slowly back toward the West End and hunt for a restaurant in the back-streets of Soho.

Just along the river is this little garden beside the Palace of Westminster where the evening sun is lighting up the gorgeous sandstone of Victoria Tower with a beautiful, buttery glow.
I swear I didn't see that girl in the miniskirt until I downloaded the photos. Honest!

While we are here I simply must sneak into the corner of the garden and check to see if I was hallucinating the last time I was here.
Woohoo!
It is still there!
La Vache!
I've yet to figure this one out … What on earth is a statue of a cow doing in Victoria Tower Garden? And why is it dressed in the robes of the House of Lords?
It seems happy enough to be there so we leave it to its ruminations.

By this time the day is drawing to an end and the Eye and Westminster Bridge are suffused with the warmth of the dying light of an autumn evening.

Katie calls out "That's The Burghers Of Calais, isn't it?" and heads for the statue by Victoria Tower.
As she gets closer her smile broadens …
"I know my Rodin!"
And she is right, of course. What a smartypants!

The Burghers do look pretty wretched and miserable awaiting execution, having sacrificed themselves to save their townsfolk, but then they weren't to know at that moment that Philippa of Hainault would spare their lives.
Rodin apparently never completed the second statue "The Burghers Of Calais Celebrate Their Reprieve By Getting Totally Shitfaced And Dancing Like Your Dad."

Katie and Dive head back yet again across Parliament Square and on into St.James's Park, stopping briefly to watch the sun set over the Parasite House.
The pelicans are already asleep on their island and as night falls around us it is time to hit the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus and find somewhere to have dinner.

Wending our curious way through the narrow, darkened streets and alleys, past shouty, singing drunks and through thronging crowds of party people, we check out the plethora of international cuisines available in the maze of back-streets that is Soho; that ancient den of iniquity and … er … lapdancing clubs where all the good little restaurants tend to cluster.

Head waiters leap from entrances as soon as we start reading their menus but we resist their blandishments and decide to plump for the Mumbai in Denman Street.

Katie has never had "proper Indian" as we call the Bangladeshi cuisine that constitutes most of England's national dishes.
The Raj lasted for so long that Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi cuisine and culture is as much a part of England as steak and kidney pie and London buses.

This - sadly - is my last photo of Katie (sob).
Here we have just enjoyed a yummy starter of prawn puri; a deliciously spiced dish served up on that most buttery of puffy, fried breads with a cucumber raitha.

We avoid the stupidly hot dishes as this is Katie's first foray into the sub-continent and she chooses a prawn Madras while I have an excellent fish bhuna; which we accompany with mouth-watering side dishes of sag aloo, bindhi and brinjal bhajis and sag paneer, plus beautifully sweet pewshwari naan and basmati rice.
Oh, and Indian Kingfisher lager, of course!

And we talk and talk and talk …

At last it is time to go home and we catch a tube at Piccadilly Circus that will carry Katie safely back to Bloomsbury and her hotel.
We say farewell at Holborn tube station with hugs and smiles and a promise to meet up in Paris this time next year …
… and then she is gone.
Whisked away toward St.Pancras …
A sad Dive walks the escalators toward the Central Line on my way to catch the late train home.
I sigh and smile at all the happy memories of the past two days but it's going to be a long, cold and lonely journey back to my empty house.

Katie will still be in London until the following afternoon, meeting Rose from Canterbury Daily Photo for a meal and a trip on the Eye.

Old Dive sits on the train in the dark, smiling as I flick through the photos on my little screen.

The day after next, with Katie back in Paris, Rose sends me a wonderful present, entitled "Katie Reading Dive's Blog".

Here is Katie out to lunch with Rose in Covent Garden, reading my first "Katie And Dive Do London" post on Rose's iPhone.

It has been a marvellous couple of days. We have walked several thousand miles and enjoyed so many galleries, exhibitions and mosaics and done so much sightseeing we have almost worn our eyes out.

Most importantly we have become friends and next autumn in Paris I know we shall strengthen that friendship.

A million thanks, Katie!
See you in Paris!