Of course, I should have known that ending a message with ‘a bientôt’ was asking for trouble. Four months have passed in the blink, it seems, of an eye. The first of them was a well deserved jaunt round the Alcarria, the quid-pro-quo of holding the bastion in the summer haze. September is really when a girl wants to take to Spain, and Spain to a girl, but alas, instead of returning refreshed to the redoubt with the leaves on the turn, your Lucy was struck down… but I’m not going to rehearse all that here: in the well-loved words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘It is tedious to relate how it all happened’ – the mutually contradictory sawbones, the third opinions, the last minute swerve from ‘invasive surgery’…
Suffice it to say, ‘Here I am’, thinner (no bad thing), untanned (faded long since), but blonder (artifice). And what’s been going on in my absence? Both the boys have been playing real estate, shuffling houses about like a deck of cards, and a new publication is imminent: Renato Murer’s ‘The Third Sector in Europe’ – a bit of a departure for SMP, venturing into economic guru-ism, with, apparently, aplomb. While Lucy… Now you see her now you don’t… is taking the Gospel of Saint Mark into the wilds of Eire, plunging fearlessly into the Guinness tsunami with an Abandoned Islands under her shapely arm.
