Amalfi: The Road More Travelled

Italy 3


It was stunning, the Amalfi Coast.
It seems that everyone thinks it's stunning, so all in all I'm glad we weren't there in July.
It's probably like the M25. Or the Ring of Kerry on super-steroids.

Every hairpin bend brings another wonderful view. Buildings perched on sheer mountain sides, rocky peaks towering above, boats strewn haphazardly on a jewel coloured sea far below.
It's enough to cause a traffic jam - everyone stopping to take photos.
You can't blame them. We did the same. It's a place where you can capture Italy (the south, anyway) in a single shot.

Southern Italy in a single shot

We didn't stop in Positano. I'd love to have pottered around the town, but it was too full of visitors for comfort.
We stopped further down the coast instead, at a tiny inlet the In-Charge spotted from our lofty height on the road. We wound our way down and happily paid the extortionate parking fee so that we could sit under an umbrella in the blazing midday sun drinking Prosecco. And watch some lads loading crates of beer onto a boat to deliver to a bar a few inlets along. Apparently, the only other way for them to get their beer is to tote it down a thousand or so steps.
There'd be none left by the time they got to the bottom.

We did stop in Amalfi. It was €5 an hour to park, which was even more expensive than the little inlet, but we found a vacant slot right on the front, so we did a lightning tour of the town.
It was beautiful, but to be honest, an hour was enough.
The place was packed and the locals in the shops and bars had obvious tourist-fatigue. Hardly surprising.

Amalfi

The town was packed

Everyone photographing everyone photographing everyone

I had the most expensive ice cream in the world, and then we sat looking over the sea and yacht-gazing while we had a drink before heading along the coast to Ravello.

We sat under the iconic umbrella pines overlooking the sea

A spot of yacht-watching is always fun. It reminds us of #1 Son

It was, thankfully, a good bit calmer in Ravello, despite the town's illustrious catalogue of earlier visitors.
The list of people who have visited the place, or written famous books or operas there, or just stayed with other famous people is endless.
In a more romantic era these included Ruskin, Grieg, most of the Bloomsbury Set including Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell, Vita Sackville-West, DH Lawrence and TS Elliot. Wagner wrote Parsifal in Ravello, André Gide wrote L'Immortaliste, Churchill painted and Escher drew.
And in more recent times the tiny town has been host to Paul Newman, Rod Stewart, Harrison Ford, Roger Moore, Nicholas Cage, Mel Gibson, John Malkovich and Pierce Brosnan - amongst others. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie shot parts of Mr and Mrs Smith in the town, Gary Lineker got married there and Woody Harrelson's daughter was born there, so he named her Ravello.

The view down from the old town

Inside one of the hotels. Who knows which celebrities might have been lurking within?

None of those people were in the streets on the day we visited. In fact, we didn't spot any celebrities - though to be honest, I wasn't really looking.
I got waylaid by several shops selling pottery and the maiolica typical of the area.
I loved the spotty-ware, and some of the maiolica pieces were stunning. I was very taken by an interesting platter fixed to the wall, but in the end I settled for a much simpler (and smaller) memento. A Christmas tree decoration with a bird on it.

Lovely spotty pottery

An interesting platter stuck to the wall

I bought a little Christmas tree decoration. I like birds

We decided to drive back cross-country, through the mountains, and reluctantly roused Angelica. She'd had a day off.
It was a good decision. Angelica rose to the challenge and we hardly met anyone, beyond a flock of goats, the goatherd and his dogs.
We'd loved the stunning views, the towns clinging to the mountain-sides, the yachts and the jewel coloured sea - everything.
But we were ready to head further south to quieter places.

On duty

This is part 3 of our travels in Italy
You might also like Part 1: See Naples and Die
Part 2: Sipping Limoncello in Sorrento
Part 4: Tango-ing to Messina
And the last part: Sicily: Hot on the Heels of Montalbano

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

I sat down two days ago to sort out a bag of paperwork that has been sitting, minding its own business for six months. I have to confess that we are neither very tidy nor very organised about lots of things, paperwork being top of the list. Or bottom of the list, depending on which way you look at it.
I was only driven to do something about it now because I want my bag back.

I have my bag back at last!

The trouble with us is that every now and again we can no longer cope with not being able to see the kitchen table. (Literally.) At this point lots of virtuous people would sit down and sort out the offending mass of mess. Sometimes I too am virtuous, but if there are too many other things going on, I sweep the whole lot into a tottering pile and shove it into the first box or bag that comes to hand.
Thus is was six months ago, and unfortunately, the first empty receptacle that came to hand was the lovely bag my mother gave me last Christmas.
Since then I have added to its contents, but not taken anything away.

I never know which side I like best

Happily - by chance rather than planning - the electricity has not been cut off, and neither have the bailiffs arrived at the door in the interim. There were bank statements, bills, receipts, newspaper cuttings, work stuff, notes to self, telephone messages and what-all else... but now, after my final stint with the bag this morning, I have reduced its contents to several piles: a large one of rubbish, one of filing (which - alas - could be the start of the next bagful, unless I actually file the wretched stuff), a small pile of 'in urgent need of attention' and a somewhat larger pile of 'on-going'. But, I have my bag back.
I also have a little heap of scraps which I discovered stuffed down amidst all the bills and receipts, which turned out to be the paraphernalia we brought back from Paris in June.

Oh joy! Needless to say, I spent more time going through that than I did the dreary bank statements.
It was the typical ephemera one brings back from holiday. At least, I presume 'one' does. We certainly always seem to have bags and pockets full of cafe receipts, gallery cards, museum tickets, maps and who knows what.

Jardin du Luxembourg

So much else has happened this summer that I haven't spent much time mentally revisiting our lovely trip to Paris, so it was very nice to sort through all the bits and bobs.

'A litre and a half of bottled water only costs 23c in Paris' I told the In-Charge, apropos of very little. A supermarket bill - which I probably didn't glance at at the time, now made riveting reading.
'Did we really spend  €14 on a cup of coffee and a glass of wine?' I asked in disbelief as I picked up the next slip of paper.
'I expect it was Les Deux Magots or that expensive cafe at St Michel,' he replied, and added sagely: 'It's a bit late to be worrying about that now.'
How true. And now that I recall, it was St Michel, and we'd dodged in out of bucketing rain at the time, and we really hadn't cared at all.

St Michel another day - watching the brilliant street performers

I found a list of incomprehensible notes scribbled on a scrap of card and puzzled over it for several minutes before remembering that we had, at long last, after I don't know how many previous visits to Paris, spent a happy afternoon exploring each and every one of the Passages - some in sad disrepair, others a total delight. If the notes I'd jotted down were even slightly decipherable, they'd be a useful guide next time round, but sadly even I can't get to the bottom of my own scrawl.

One of Paris's beautiful Passages

Probably the most famous of the Passages

And here's another - with colourful guerilla knitting decorating the entrance!

Another dog-end of paper revealed my approximation of the recipe that must have been used to concoct one of the most delicious tartes it was my pleasure to sample. So good was it, in fact, that we had to re-visit  Le Bistrot du Peintre several times to test it all over again. It never failed to hit the spot. I'd forgotten about it, but I must have an experimental session in the kitchen. (Current note to self: buy oranges, almonds and ingredients for sweet pastry deliciousness.)

Inside Le Bistrot du Peintre

And speaking of deliciousness, the next item to emerge was the business card of a chap we'd got chatting to in the Marché Bourse. He plied us with samples of his wares, and told us that although he got up before dawn every morning to cook, it was all worthwhile as he went to Boston several times a year to visit his sister. He was Lebanese, and his food was so delectable, we bought enough for supper that night and a picnic lunch in the Jardin du Luxembourg the next day. (And while we were talking to him, two girls came up and presented us with a shopping bag listing all the Paris street markets, their arrondissements and addresses. How cool is that!)


There was a receipt from the Kilo Shop - the wonderful emporium on St Germain where vintage clothes are sold by weight; train tickets from our trip to Monet's garden at Giverny; passes for the Musée d'Orsay (probably my favourite of all the Paris art museums) and a billet for the Sainte Chapelle - another favourite place of incomparable beauty.

Gingham shirts in the Kilo Shop

Inside the wonderful Musée d'Orsay

Some of the amazing, original floor tiles in the Sainte Chapelle

One of the windows of the Sainte Chapelle (taken, sadly, with my phone camera)

The Rose window - also, alas, taken with my phone camera

It didn't do much to reduce the pile of paperwork, but it was a very happy half hour remembering our holiday in Paris.

'There's an un-used Metro ticket here,' I said, picking up a little blue and orange-stamped Mobilis from some carnet we bought along the line.
'I suppose we'll have to go back then,' the In-Charge replied.
It can't happen too soon.

The famous bridge in Monet's garden at Giverny

What Price the Perfect Getaway?

It's blowing a gale out here on the edge of the world today.
My poor trees, heavy in their summer frocks, are being whipped back and forth. It's not fair.
But then, as we all know, life isn't fair.

Mercifully the promised rain has not yet arrived. I've got soaked most days this week, trying to garden in the rain, so today's wind, blowing warmly - if rather too enthusiastically - from the south wasn't going to put me off. However, it seemed only sensible to do a job out of the teeth of the gale, so I headed into the flower garden which is generally fairly sheltered and found to my delight that not a leaf was stirring in my new little moon garden.

The little moon garden

There was plenty to do. The weeds and grass have encroached into the semi-circular bed, and lots of early summer perennials needed a good cutting back. I was soon wading through dense knee-high greenery, and thought as I often do, of my ex-sister-in-law's words many years ago.
'At least there aren't any snakes in Ireland.'
She and my brother were living in Africa at the time, their children still quite small, and I'd been apologising for the wet August weather that attended their visit to us, along with its consequent lush growth overflowing the garden paths. It was like a jungle, but the kids loved it, and no one minded the rain either. 'It never rains in Africa,' they said.

Today it didn't rain either, but the ground was still soft from the wet week we've had, and the weeds in the new bed came out easily, so that within moments of starting work, my mind had wandered off onto lots of other things. The dogs rummaged through their ossuary while I sat on the little bench drinking a cuppa and contemplating my newest patch - barely a year old, yet already ripe with flowers and growth. I found it hard to visualise how that small area used to be - a wilderness of overgrown fuchsia and bamboo - even though we'd lived with it for donkey's years.

It's now a place of seclusion and peace - even on a day of stormy southern winds. And the little seat that the In-Charge made by recycling two old bench ends and some lengths of teak he had stashed away in his workshop, fits as if it had been made to measure.
Not many weeks ago we made the happy discovery that it is the perfect place to catch the very last rays of sunshine when the mid-summer days are so long, the sun practically sets in the north.
Our very own little getaway.

Hard at work in the moon garden - so called for its half moon path

Everyone needs a getaway. Somewhere quiet and peaceful to contemplate something green.
I often think that in today's overcrowded world we expect a lot from human beings. I am so lucky to have so much space, but most people are squashed tighter and tighter together, and yet, more than ever before, we expect everyone to 'play nicely'.
Losing it isn't allowed.
But everyone needs somewhere to let off steam. Somewhere calm and green.

The only big city I have lived in for any length of time is London. I moved there as a student and just sort of stayed for the next twenty years. London has its fair share of dreadful housing, but it also has lots of green spaces - squares and parks, woods and commons. I was commenting to my mother only recently that while I don't ever recall having the luxury of central heating as a student, I only ever chose flat/house shares that had some sort of garden, however small.

I watched a wonderful programme the other day, about the inspirational designer Thomas Heatherwick, he of the fabulous Olympic Cauldron fame (amongst other things.)

The wonderful Olympic Cauldron

If you didn't see the programme, do watch it - BBC2's Culture Show - I think it is only available for a few more days.
He is designing a Garden Bridge for central London. A pedestrian bridge filled with trees, flowers, birds, bees and butterflies. I'm not sure if it was originally his idea, or Joanna Lumley's but whoever thought of it, 'more power to them', as they would say in Ireland.

They just need someone to pay for it. Needless to say, it will be very expensive.
But what price such a perfect, green, soul-replenishing getaway?
Maybe the Beckhams could fund it. They have plenty of money, not to mention a child named after a bridge.
They could do this one in reverse - name a bridge after a child. The Harper Seven Bridge perhaps?
I don't suppose anyone would mind what it was called, if they could sit there and breathe out steam and breathe in green peace and birdsong.

An artist's impression of the proposed Garden Bridge for Central London

Le Retour

It's been a long time since I sharpened the end of my finger, licked it, and jotted down a few words.
I'm sorry about that.
Life, as everyone knows, sometimes takes over.

And now suddenly it's June. Blazing June even - at the moment, anyway.
I can only really believe it is June because it was my birthday on Friday. (As I'm going backwards these days, 'Bring 'em on!' is all I can say.)
But more exciting even than a backwards-birthday, is that we have just returned from Paris.

La Conciergerie

I love Paris.
I daresay that's a bit of a cliche, because who - in their right mind - doesn't?
I don't find the Parisians unbearable, or, generally, rude. The city never ceases to thrill me, and no matter how often we were to visit, I'd never get bored.
However, I did have to part with both my kidneys on this trip - Paris has become even more shockingly expensive than before. But on the plus side, life back home seems much cheaper by comparison. And in a country that never seems cheap, that's quite a bonus, even if it's short lived.

As for coming back to blazing sunshine - well, that's even more of a bonus.
Sitting in the courtyard with a glass of wine, I can almost trick myself into thinking I'm still on the Ile St Louis.
Or heading home across Le Petit Pont.
Well, if I close my eyes, that is.

Notre Dame from the garden of Julian le Pauvre

As we were walking down towards the Seine from the Opera a few days ago, I idly asked the In-Charge what 10 individual words he would pick to sum up our time in Paris.
I guess everyone plays these games.
Our favourite is when we visit an exhibition or gallery or museum, we both afterwards have to say which item/artwork we have walked out with under one arm.
Sometimes we have to allow ourselves two. (Each)

The Opera

My question in Paris wasn't that easy to answer, and we discussed it all the way down to the Pont des Arts. Inevitably, while we had some overlaps, we also came up with some different answers.

'€€€€€€€kkk !' was the In-Charge's immediate response, and - with the kidney-removal-scars still fairly raw - I had to agree; although my first thought was 'Pounds, Pounds, Pounds, Pounds, Pounds!'
(Why did no one remind me that the average person's visit to Paris will result in The Kilo-a-Day-Weight-Enhancement-Effect?)

So my standing on the Pont des Arts didn't help it any.
These days it is bowed down with padlocks, and one wonders how heavy they are en masse, and if or when the poor old bridge might sink beneath the grey-green-but-not-greasy waters of the Seine.

Pont des Arts looking towards Ile de la Cite

Apparently the Pont des Arts is where you place a padlock with your life partner (should you feel so inclined), but if the padlock is for your lover, then you should go to the Pont de l'Archevêché. 
Just a hint, if you're heading to Paris...
The padlocks were all removed in 2010 and although everyone blamed the City Council, it turned out they were taken by a student from the nearby École des Beaux-Arts to create a sculpture.
I feel the sculpture ought to be on public display on the Left Bank.
Perhaps it is, but we didn't see it.

Padlocks on the Pont des Arts

Anyway, we still haven't finalised our list, but I shall keep you posted.
Not today. 
While the sun is shining, I feel it behoves me to sit in the courtyard, close my eyes and have another sip of wine.
At least this glass won't cost my liver... (Ha ha)

April's Fool

Malus Liset in all its glory

April has not started well. Despite the fact that it is - along with May - my favourite month.
You will have to forgive me, dear Reader, if I have a little whinge.

The north wind doth blow - even as they predicted -  and it cuts through you like the grim reaper's scythe. Moreover, it has, as expected, brought not snow, but hail which congeals in odd corners like rejected, frozen tapioca pudding.
And is just about as appealing.

That is not all.


Despite the promise of all his worldly goods, I am not at all convinced that Marie Walewska is in love with poor Napoleon. He seems pale and shell-shocked by comparison with his former self. He has lost the strut in his step since he lost his little Empress.

Marie Walewska is taking time to adjust

Despite her syrup-coloured eyes, Marie Walewska doesn't pamper him, and tell him that he's wonderful, or scold him if he leaves her side for a minute. She doesn't rush over when he triumphantly displays the smorgasbord I lay before them each morning, and pretend, as his loving wife used to do, that he has found it all by himself. She doesn't even flirt and seduce him as a mistress should. In fact, I think her chicken-heart secretly pines for Wellington and the faceless harem, even though it's dominated by girls twice her size.

 Wellington is as big as the Rock of Gibraltar, but blacker

But there is worse.
I have so far shielded you from my automotive problems, but I can do so no longer.
In these recessionary and impecunious times, the In-Charge and I share a vehicle, and I set out in this silver beast yesterday to collect my brother from the airport - dear brother of blog-repairing fame. Five miles into the return journey, the car coughed in a surprised sort of way and sighed to a halt. Twenty minutes later, during which we sat and watched the rain sweep sideways across the windscreen, it agreed to lurch another mile, and ten minutes after that it apologetically limped a final hundred yards before graciously staggering off the narrow back road onto the hardstanding outside someone's house.
Before you give the patient a round of applause, I would just like to point out that this is the third - yes, third - major breakdown of the year.

The silver beast is like some spoilt only-child.
It has  been showered with new things.
It has had all my money.
What does it want?
Blood?

Brother and I conferred by phone with the In-Charge, who instructed us to consult the manual.  Incredibly, this was to hand in the car - you see why husband is the In-Charge and I am merely the Boss!
OK, I'll be scrupulously honest here. I did not consult the manual.
Have you ever noticed that all manuals are written in Double Dutch?
Dear brother consulted the manual and even more nobly, braved the bitter wind to dirty his hands under the bonnet, but it was to no avail.
Thankfully a knight in shining armour offered to rush, ventre a terre to the scene on his trusty steed, or rather in his little red Corsa (does that make him a corsair not a knight, I wonder?) He arrived an hour or two later, bringing the In-Charge, but it was still to no avail and we all returned home in the trusty - the TRUSTY - little red car.

As the In-Charge has black fingers (the mechanic's answer to green-fingers), I know the patient is ill indeed.
It has been left, forlorn and lonely, to have a good long think about its uncalled for behaviour until tomorrow.
Heaven knows what will happen then, but I am not expecting an apology and I daresay Saturday detention will be called for. Detention until further notice, no doubt, during which the beast will sulk until we buy it an expensive new present - a fuel pump or something.
The brat.

And now it is 4am, and just when I need him most, Morpheus refuses to clasp me to his comforting bosom.
Also, although it is still pitch dark outside, there is a bird singing.
What is there to sing about, I'd like to know?

April has not started well.
Despite the blossom - despite the blossom.

Keep calm - and waste not

I bought a waste paper bin yesterday.
I didn't set out to buy one, but every now and then, in lieu of holidays, I take a day off and scarper. It's a great way of shimmying down from the edge when life is shoving you in the back.
Yesterday was one of those rare and joyous days. And while I was out, I bought a bin.

Oh wow - 'be still my beating heart', I hear you cry.
Fair enough. Not the most exciting of purchases. (I did buy one or two other things, but the bin is the one that stands out.)
It's one of those British retro-style items, reminiscent of the World War II era.
It's pillar-box red with a stylised crown and a slogan on it.
The slogan reads: 'Keep calm and carry on'.
I would have preferred 'Keep calm and eat cake', or even better 'Keep calm and have a gin & tonic', but sadly neither of those were on offer.

How thrilling is that?

I could have had 'Waste not, want not'. In fact that was the one I picked up first, but when it came to it, I just couldn't do it.

Daft really.

If you are my age, then your parents were either war-youngsters, or actually took an active role in WWII.
If you are a bit younger, then maybe your grandparents lived through the war.
If you are younger still, then you won't have a clue what I'm on about.
But the rest of us know that anyone who lived through the war can't throw away so much as a length of string or a candle stump.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking thrift, even thrift that to the uninitiated smacks of parsimony..
But where thrift is concerned, initiation does help.
Unless you've lived through the war - any war, probably - I don't suppose you can ever understand what chronic shortage really means. I certainly don't.
It's hard to imagine, after the surfeits of our own times, but in Britain, people were allowed just 1 egg, 2oz (not quite 60g) butter and 2oz cheese per person per week - less if it wasn't available. And meat, sugar, flour, jam etc etc etc were all rationed too.

And it wasn't just for the six years of the war - rationing didn't end until 1954!
I seem to spend a good deal of time scratching my head wondering what to make for dinner.
Can you imagine trying to feed a family back in those days?
And it wasn't just food. Clothes were rationed too. Try telling the average girl today that her clothes were going to be rationed from now on. Seriously rationed. No more Saturday afternoons in the mall.

Not everything was rationed. Some things were simply unobtainable.

So you can't exactly blame the older generation for hanging on to stuff - understandably, waste not, want not was their credo.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era and environment of plenty, but old habits don't die, so I was brought up with the concept of 'reduce, recycle and reuse' long before the ad men turned it into a slogan to save the world.



Of course, it wasn't just me. Lots of people were brought up that way.
Buy hey - no one's perfect! Every generation kicks back at the one that brought them up.
It's a great concept. It's even a great slogan. I love the idea of it, and I wholeheartedly support it. And gees-louise, we surely do need to adopt it because over the last 60 years we have totally messed up.
But I don't hang on to every bit of string and candle stump.
Instead I live with a virtual wagging finger, with a shadow of disapproval falling over me every time I chuck a plastic bag, dump a perfectly good paper carrier, scrunch tin foil, scrumple up gift wrap or ditch the fag-end of a bar of soap.

But the greatest sin of all is to throw food away.

I may not be squeaky clean on the tin foil and plastic bag front, but I really baulk at binning food.

Apparently (in the British Isles anyway), - if everyone threw one in three of their carrier bags away as they left the supermarket each week, that is how much of their purchase - on average - they are going to waste.
Whaaat?

You don't need to be a war-baby to be utterly appalled by that.
What happened to 'left-overs'?
What happened to 'Ort Pie' - something delicious constructed from whatever happened to be left over in the fridge?
Well, ok, an attempt at something delicious! In the name of culinary inventiveness or, failing that, pure unadulterated skint-ness, it's got to be worth a try.

Nothing - well, practically nothing - well, very little is ever thrown away in our house.
(How's that for self-rightousness?)
Before I fall off my own pedestal, I'd better confess.
For one thing, we are both based at home, so if something is left over from supper, it can be made into lunch the next day.
For another, I do have a battery of  back-up options. There is a strict protocol governing anything rejected by humans. First refusal = dogs. Second refusal = cats. Third refusal = hens, and if all else fails, final refusal = the bird table. I have to say, not much makes it that far down the line. Occasionally I by-pass the line and make an outright donation to the hens or the bird-table. Bread, for example, that has turned silently to the texture of old plasterboard. Ends of cheese that have transformed into transluscent plastic. (How does cheese do that?)

Second refusal = cats

And then - while I'm still in the confessional - there's the fungus-y stuff. The container in the back of the fridge that you pull out and look at and think - that needs eating. Um - maybe not tonight though... So you put it back. And back. Until eventually it feels so unloved it grows its own comfort blanket.

There are some things that have to be thrown away.

Speaking of comfort blankets and disposal, I had an interesting experience recently. I was away for a week, helping my brother move house. Lovingly - rather virtuously, I thought - I made a large casserole to keep the troops going for a few days in my absence. I left it on top of the oven.. About a week after I got home, I rooted in the cupboard for the casserole dish and fished it out. Gosh, I thought to myself, this old pot is even heavier than I thought it was.
Hah!
When I opened it, there was the stew. Or rather, there were the mountains of the moon, comprising several species of fungus hitherto unknown to science.
Don't even ask...

(But yes, by some miracle, we are still co-habiting. Acceptance is just one of the many marvels of the human psyche.)

But for all our sins and oversights, there is very little that gets thrown away (or buried in a deep hole, far from the prying noses of rats and foxes).
Something of the make-do and mend of my childhood has lingered in there somewhere.
Probably just as well, with all of us the world over, teetering on the edge of serious shortages of money and food and resources. I can't see anyone in the first world taking very well to rationing though.
Hopefully it won't come to that. But maybe the shadow of it still hangs over us. Like some sort of genetic imprint.
I guess that's why 'Waste not, want not' was just a step too far. A truth too close to the bone.

I'd rather stay calm and eat cake. But if I can't do that, I'll opt for staying calm and carrying on.

Stay calm and eat cake

Shoe Boxes v Handbags

Feeling pink? Fly-the-flag bag

 I was listening to the radio the other day - or at least, it was on in some shop.
They were discussing moral issues.
To be precise, they were discussing a handbag.
Apparently it cost 18,000 euros.

That is one heck of a lot of handbag.- or possibly just one heck of a lot of euros.

Mercifully, for the state of my sanity, the overall consensus was that it would be obscene to spend 18,000 on a handbag. Even if you had it to spare. Or even 9,000. Or even 4,500 - or - well, you're getting my drift.

How much is it permissible to spend on a handbag?
I don't know, and you're talking to someone who is known to fall for handbags on a regular basis here.

Thrilling pink straw bag, bought in a French supermarket

In fact my darling son has taken to walking into a well known purveyor of such choice items and buying the glitziest, prettiest handbag he can see every birthday or Christmas time, bless his cotton socks. (There's nothing like bringing them up to REALLY understand how women tick!)

Sometimes he buys me bags that are even more grown-up than I am

But 18,000?
OK - lets get the gloves off here. Forget 18,000. I have spent most of my life being totally broke, so obviously my sights are a good bit lower than most. But even so.
I would have serious difficulty in coping with a handbag that cost 1,000 - let alone 18.
Diamond encrustations notwithstanding.

Diamond encrustations, as you can see. It came in at a tad under the 18,000.

I'd find myself looking at it and mentally stacking up all the other stuff it could have bought, alongside its glamorous gorgeousness. I'd end up not using it, because it bugged me, somewhere deep down inside.
And that really would be a waste.

Maybe that all sounds a bit high-horseish. It probably does.
But the reason it has sprung to mind today is that I am surrounded, in my rather unkempt kitchen, by glittery pencils and glitzy stickers, and novelty rubbers and pretty little notebooks. By pencil cases and fun-socks, hair ties and wondrous marbles.

I don't know what bit of Christmas turns you on the most - if you celebrate Christmas in any shape or form - but when my kids were young, and indeed, when I was young myself, the very, very best bit of Christmas was the stocking that Father Christmas left at the end of the bed. It wasn't a pillowcase, or anything gross like that, just a large stocking stuffed with all manner of little, joyful, crazily-exciting bits and bobs. And of course, being a girl, the super-best bits were always very colourful and glittery.

You're probably picking up on the glittery, sequinned theme at this stage

And when I finally grew up (well, sort of grew up), it gave me more pleasure than anything else to fill those stockings for my kids, and to watch their faces on Christmas morning as they opened them while we all sat around eating breakfast by the fire and the Christmas tree. Well - I ate the breakfast, probably, knowing me - and they opened their stockings and devoured the edible bits.

I'll be frank - I'm not above putting stockings together for them even now, if they are able to get home for Christmas - but this morning I'm putting together Christmas stocking 'Shoe Boxes' to be sent to 2-14 year olds abroad who otherwise won't get a present. All I can say is, if it gives each of them - any of them - as much pleasure to open as it has given me to put together, wow - RESULT! And some.

The question going round in the back of my mind as I'm tying up little parcels of stick-on jewels is this: how many Shoe Boxes could you make for 18,000?

Total joy