Absence and presents

Today is - or would have been - my mother's birthday.

Talking to my brother recently, he said "Sometimes I find myself looking at things in shops, and thinking 'There is no longer anyone on earth I might buy that for'."

Oh, yes.

Tasting, tasting

After talking about it for some time, we finally organised a wine tasting on Sunday. We aimed to have a dozen people (we were eleven, in the end) each providing a bottle of wine with its label obscured. We weren't over-serious about it - the offer of pens and paper was firmly declined - but everyone had made an effort to find a wine that would be both good and interesting, and in among the conversation we did try to identify what we were drinking. And we drank a lot of very enjoyable wines.
( Don't pass the cut unless you want to know what they were! )

I'm pleased with how it went: there wasn't one wine there I didn't enjoy (I think I still like mine best, but then my tastes are notoriously wayward), people seemed to get on well together, there was talk of "next time" - and I get a buzz out of being able to sit eleven people round my table (OK, round the dining room and kitchen tables pushed together) and given them a chair, a plate, a wine glass and a waterglass each.