Last days in the snow in Montrondo, “we must stop Trump”, my Father reflects on the tragedies in his life, Leap day, this year’s Oscars go to …, Peter Rabbit gets his own 50p coin (and “he didn’t have to steal it”), Suzy in Primrose Hill, a speeding fine, a political kiss during Spain’s fraught parliament investiture, another old pupil from Bradford Grammar School reaches out to my Father, “The Secret Classrooms”, my thoughts on the BBC War and Peace series and other stories

Sunday 6^th March 2016

Me in the snow last Saturday in Montrondo

Hi everyone, I hope you’ve all had a great week.

I left off last Saturday morning in Montrondo where, to my delight, it continued to snow. The village looked beautiful as you can see in the photo below

A wintery view of our village - Montrondo (in the snow last Saturday)

It snowed all morning and was windy, so we stayed inside feeling warm and cozy with our efficient central heating, thick walls and Eladio’s fire on.  I made fish and chips for lunch; so British!

Home made fish and chips for lunch in Montrondo last Saturday

We dared out in the early evening when the snow seemed to have stopped and even the sun was attempting to come out of the thick clouds.  The photo illustrating this week’s post is of me feeling exhilarated on that particular walk to Murias and back. We went on the old path with thick virgin snow.  It was of course difficult for Pippa, our miniature dachshund, to walk in the snow because of her short legs. The answer was for us to walk ahead and for her to follow in our footsteps once we had trodden in the deep snow.  Here is Eladio walking with little Pippa valiantly following behind.

The old path to Murias on Saturday, Pippa following in Eladio's footsteps as the snow was too deep for her

After the walk I started on the latest book of Jeffrey Archer’s Clifton Chronicles, Cometh the Hour which is actually the 5^th book.  There will only be one more.  It was lovely to read in front of the fire with Pippa, duly washed and dried after the snowy walk, sitting beside me on her blanket.

This week's book which I read in Montrondo

After dinner we continued watching the Danish series  The Killing on Netflix.  It’s great to have all the modern comforts in our newly restored house in Montrondo.  It really is a home away from home.

The series we are watching on Netflix at the moment

Sunday was our last day in Montrondo.  I woke up to even more snow and immediately took photos to post on Facebook.  The words from the famous Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas “deep and crisp and even” came to mind when I posted them and here they are.

The snow was "crisp and deep and even" on Sunday morning in Montrondo

That morning whilst reading the news I was struck by an article written by Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Harvard, for The Washington Post. It was entitled “The Moment of Truth, we must stop Trump”.  Donald Trump, the joke candidate for the Republican Party in the upcoming US elections, is no joke as popularity for him increases.  Most of the world is looking on quite stunned, including some of his republican colleagues.  This is what Danielle Allen wrote and I really could not agree more. “Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country”.  If he becomes the next President of the USA which I sincerely hope he doesn’t, only time will tell whether this political theorist at Harvard University is right or not. What I cannot understand is how he has got so far; it does not seem possible and yet it is.  I only wish he was a joke like the one in the photo below.

Did you ever wonder what happened to
Dennis the Menace when he got older?

We went on our last walk in the snow, this time all the way to Senra and back, nearly 8km.  This time the snow was too deep for us to venture on the old path, so we walked along the road which had been cleared earlier by a snow plough. Here I am with little Pippa who I am sure was happier to walk on the road.

On the walk to Senra with Pippa last Sunday morning

It snowed all the way but thankfully was not too windy.  It was bitterly cold though, as you can judge from the photo I took of Eladio who is all wrapped up by the Montrondo signpost on our way back.

Eladio all wrapped up and posing by the Montrondo sign on our way back from Senra last Sunday

Meanwhile in Madrid Oli who was back from Paris was talking to my Father.  He had a cold and what with the awful fall, I think he was feeling a little down. She spoke to him to perk him up but the subject of their conversation was very sad.  He told her the story of the death of his dear brother Raymond who died of polio aged only 16.  My Father was 5 years older than him and this must have been in 1940.  It was a huge tragedy for the family, including my Father.  Uncle Raymond, as he was known to me, was always remembered as a vivacious boy who loved mechanical things and apparently once took his father’s car apart and then put it all back together again and I would have loved to have known him. He died in Western Super Mare, away from the family so as not to pass on the deadly illness to his sister Gloria or my Father.  Polio was a killer in those days until thankfully a vaccination was found. Oli told me about the conversation and that she had cried as she thought my Father had too.

Pictures of my Father's beloved brother Raymond who died tragically of polio aged just 16

In order to comfort my Father Olivia said that he’d had a wonderful life.  Usually my Father is very optimistic, something he passed on to me but last Sunday he replied yes, but that he had a lot of tragedies.  He must have been feeling quite down that day and I am glad he had his granddaughter to pour out his heart to. I can tell you he has had more than his fair share of tragedies.  It started with his brother Raymond.  He went on to lose his Father (Canon John Lloyd) before he was 70 and his Mother (nee Dorothy Gertrude Scull, an accomplished pianist) in her early 70s.  But a bigger blow was to come when he lost his sister, my Aunty Gloria, and all her family (husband Derek and children Jacqueline aged 12, Michael aged 9 and little Anthony aged 7) in an air crash in Yugoslavia in 1971.  Then my Mother died, leaving him a widow, in 1999 and cruelly just 2 years later we lost George, his son and my brother, in his 40’s who died of melanoma cancer in London.  My troubled brother George was the real family tragedy. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early 20's. There was an after blow a few years later when George’s sweet and disturbed Serbian wife was found dead in her flat in London after a bought of pneumonia. When the police rang me, they told me they thought she had just let herself die.  So you see my dear wonderful Father has had more than his fair share of tragedies.  Thankfully he has me; we are all that is left of the family but then of course he is part of the family Eladio and I have formed together and despite his age, nearly 97, I hope he feels happy and well cared for here with us in Spain and continues to enjoy the small pleasures life brings; another mantra I have learned from him.

We left Montrondo after lunch and were home at just after 8.  It was lovely to see Oli and Grandpa again.  Dinner was nice too as we were joined by Copi, the girls’ oldest friend from their school, St. Michael’s.

On Monday it was back to fasting and two walks a day.  It was 29^th February and Leap Day.  It was Julius Caesar who introduced the first leap year over 2000 years ago. His  Julian calendar had the rule that any year evenly divisible by four would be a leap year. As time passed Leap day brought with it superstitions and also traditions.  I didn’t know for example that it is customary for women to propose to men on that day.  I always feel sorry for those born on 29^th February and wonder what day they celebrate their birthday (the 28^th Feb or 1^st March) when it is not a Leap year and whether they have a full blast when it is hahahahaha.

Leap Year and its origin

On Monday morning we woke up to the news of this year’s Academy Awards, aka The Oscars.  Best picture went to Spotlight, the film about a group of journalists from The Boston Globe who investigate allegations against the priest John Geoghan accused of abusing young boys; an unfortunate and repetitive theme in the Catholic Church.  I wanted to see it but Eladio wasn’t keen.  He thinks the subject is old hat but I don’t; I think it’s despicable and probably still goes on.  I have often asked him if when he was a young boy at the Catholic Seminary if he or his fellow pupils had ever heard of experienced abuse.  Thankfully it was unheard of at his Seminary.  I’m glad to hear that.

Spotlight this year's best picture at the Oscars

The real spotlight though went to Leonardo DiCaprio as best actor in The Revenant. It was his first Oscar after 6 attempts. But the biggest story coming out of the Oscars this year was his reuniting with Kate Winslet on stage.  The audience and the internet went mad. I loved some of the British headlines telling the story, such as “Jack and Rose might not have had the happy ending they deserved in “Titanic” but they sure did at the Oscars last night” or even better, this one from The BBC: “The Titanic may have sunk but not their affection”.  As I totally loved them and the film, I was delighted too to see them reunited at Hollywood’s most glamourous event.

Lovely to see "Jack" and "Rose" reunited at this year's Oscars

There was a small piece of news on Monday that caught my attention too and I knew when I read it I had to include it here this week.  You probably know by now that I love bits of news like this. The Royal Mint has produced a 50 pence coin (in colour!) with Peter Rabbit to mark the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Beatrice Potter his creator.  I’m sure you’re wondering why that interested me.  Well I remember reading Beatrice Potter books as a child and I in turn read them to my daughters.  Olivia still has The Tales of Peter Rabbit which Amanda, my friend, gave to her when she was little. I think both Oli and Suzy will never forget that Peter Rabbit, together with his friends Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, robbed vegetables from Mr. McGregor’s garden!  I loved how The Guardian aptly used that fact in a headline, only the British press can produce, “Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit gets his own 50p coin and he didn’t have to steal it”.  I shall be on the watch for when they go on sale and must get one of the new coins. 

What a lovely idea to put Peter Rabbit on a 50p piece.

Funnily enough that day, Suzy, my eldest daughter who lives in London and has now moved to Camden, sent me a photo from Primrose Hill.

Suzy on Primrose Hill

She couldn’t have known that I have been there. Well of course I have because it is where my dear friend Amanda used to live.  It was where she lived in London when she first got married and I stayed with her there on many an occasion.  It was a beautiful area. Suzy says she wants to take me there when I go to London this month.  I would very much want Amanda to join us but unfortunately she can’t. 

Tuesday came and it was 1^st March.  Hurray spring is on its way.  It was a sunny day and we took my Father to the hospital to have his dressing changed. Thankfully from then on the district nurse would be coming home to do that. Once they had changed his bandage – by the way his wound is healing nicely – we treated him to coffee and churros at the hospital cafeteria and they weren’t that bad. I think it was a bit of an outing for him.

We had bad luck on the way back.  Eladio was caught speeding coming off the M40.  The limit was 80kmh and the “guardia civil” who stopped us said he was driving at 113kmh.  There and then he got a fine of 150 euros but worse were the two points he lost from his driving licence.  I took a discreet photo of the moment and thankfully I wasn’t caught by the policeman, otherwise I would have had a fine too hahaha.  It came as a bit of a shock actually but I think it was a very good lesson for the future for my husband who relies too much on his anti-radar device which did not detect this particular radar; a physical one.

Getting the speeding fine was a bit of a blow

Thankfully I had a bit of good news later to counteract the bad news of the speeding fine.  My Finnish friend Anne Marjut wrote to ask if she could visit us in June.  The dates are perfect and we much look forward to seeing her again.  My Father remembers her well and looks forward to seeing her too.

On Wednesday Oli was ill with an infection and I accompanied her to the local health centre.  Again it was a lovely sunny day.  It was a big day in Spanish politics.  After the hung parliament from the December elections, the Spanish parliamentary investiture debates began. 

The Spanish election results in December have resulted in a hung parliament

The socialist leader Pedro Sánchez was proposing a coalition with the new right wing party, Ciudadanos.  But it was a political kiss that stole the show. In the middle of the fraught coalition talks Pablo Iglesias, the pony tailed leader of the extreme left-wing movement Podemos, congratulated a fellow member of parliament, Xavier Domenech, with a kiss on the lips. Subsequently "Pablo Iglesias" and several related phrases and hashtags hit Twitter's worldwide trending charts and the “beso” was likened to the one on the Berlin Wall with Brezhnev and Honecker.  I still don’t understand why they kissed on the lips as it’s so un-Spanish.

The "political" kiss in parliament this week

Despite the kiss, that day Pedro Sanchez’s proposal was voted against as it would be too on Friday.  Most people’s bet is that there will be an election again in June.  I can’t see any other way out although I wonder what will happen if the people vote the same again as they did in December and we get another hung parliament.

It was on Thursday this week that yet another old pupil of my Father’s from Bradford Grammar School reached out to him via my blog. 

Bradford Grammar School where my Father taught for many years is still one of the best schools in the country

My Father taught Russian, German and French there for many years.  I always knew he was a good teacher, judging by his results and the number of boys he taught Russian to who later went on to study the language at Oxford, but that he had made such an impression on them for them, not only to remember him, but to reach out to him after some 40 years really shows he must have been a remarkable teacher.  Put yourself in their shoes. Is there a teacher you would like to get in touch with after 40 years?  Probably not.   There was only one from my school, St. Joseph’s College, Miss Fair and even I didn’t try to find her; although I did meet her at the Centenary celebrations when unfortunately she had the beginnings of Alzheimer. My Father on the contrary has a remarkable memory and certainly remembered this boy, who of course is now a man.  Let me reproduce the message he posted on my blog on Thursday.  His name is David Whitlam and this is what he wrote:

"Masha, I got your blog from Michael Forte, a recently reacquired BGS friend. Your dad taught me Russian in 1976-78 and he sent me to Tony Stokes at Univ Oxford. I subsequently lived in St Petersburg. Your dad was the greatest influence on my entire academic life and I'd be grateful if you could tell him a huge привет from Whitlam, whom he referred to as 'the phenomenon', which resulted in much teasing, I can tell you!! I hope he's feeling better after his fall. Saludos from SW4, Clapham Common ! "

I know that David’s message perked my Father up enormously that day and it made me very proud of him. I in turn posted it on facebook and another ex- pupil, Johnathan Edward Starkey wrote this:

David excelled at everything at BGS as far as I remember - cross country running, modern languages, and head of school too. It is not a surprise to me, as you know, that many old boys reach out and are absolutely sincere when they say "Your dad was the greatest influence on my entire academic life ".

And yet another ex-pupil of his, Simon Hewitt, an art critic who lives in Geneva wrote to me this week asking if my Father had read the book called “The Secret Classrooms,an untold story of the Cold War” by Harold Shuckman and Geoffrey Elliott, both “kursanti” (ex-pupils) of these secret classes. 

My parents were teachers in these secret Russian courses at Cambridge in the 50's

Well of course we had and both my parents are mentioned in the book.  My Father even went to the event at The Tate Gallery in London in 2002 when the book was presented.

My Father (son of an English clergyman born in Tamworth on 1st May 1919) and Russian Mother (née Princess Elena Von Lieven born in the Russian Embassy in Rome on June 7th 1920) met and taught at the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) in Cambridge dubbed the spy classes by the Russians and of course they were  for spies.  They started in 1952 and lasted until 1959 when we left Cambridge where I was born, to go and live in Lincolnshire where my Father became a teacher of Russian at the prestigious RAF academy at Cranwell.  The classes were secret and a major cold war initiative.  These were perhaps the happiest years of teaching for my Father and many a tale was told at tea at  home about the eccentric teachers and clever pupils.  One of the teachers was Anthony Burse, Churchill’s interpreter when he met Stalin! The Tony Stokes David Whitlam refers to was a pupil of Professor Dame Elizabeth Hill and was also an instructor on the courses. Latterly he married Marina and I remember her as Marina Stokes a course instructor on the Norwich Russian courses in the 70's when I would babysit for her daughter.

I am happy to reproduce the page about my parents in this book here:

The extract from the Book The Secret Classrooms about my parents on the JSSL course in Cambridge in the 50's

The Cambridge classrooms were organized by Dame Elizabeth Hill, Professor of Russian at the University and a very colourful person.  My Father was her right hand man. She was my brother’s god mother and I suspect very instrumental in the marriage of my parents.  My parents kept in touch over the years and they went to her 90^th birthday party in Cambridge, my Father duly sitting at her right in the photo of so many of her ex pupils. She was so eccentric she decided to get married at the age of 84 even though we all thought she was the eternal spinster. Amazingly, my Father met her by accident on her honeymoon in Spain.  He had gone to the train station in Madrid to buy bus tickets to Alicante and there she was bussing it around Spain at 84 on her honeymoon.  You might be interested to know that not long afterwards she divorced him!

My parents in 1955 in Cambridge with Liza Hill.  I think the man on her left was the man she later married
I have to admit I have been mulling over these stories in most of my walks this week when I have so much time to reflect and have spent time talking to my Father about his pupils and of course the Russian courses at Cambridge at lunchtime too.  I also learned finally how he learned Russian and how my Mother came to join the courses at Cambridge but that I am afraid will have to wait for another time, or the book I am planning to write, as I am winding on.

I thought about all this too when I went to the hairdresser in the evening. Unfortunately my usual hairdresser Merche wasn’t there but a new girl, Elena, did a pretty good job.  Eladio later remarked my hairstyle was similar to Esperanza Aguirre’s (a Spanish high profile woman right wing politician who speaks her mind) which made me laugh.

I went to the hairdresser on Thursday evening

On Friday spring was really in the air.  It was not only sunny but the blossom was coming out on our miniature plum trees which always makes me happy.

Blossom in our garden this week - a true sign  spring is coming

It was on Friday afternoon that I finished binge watching the new BBC series of War and Peace. 

Pierre, Natasha and Andrei in the BBC series War and Peace which I binge watched this week

So what did I think of it? Well many things and overall I loved it.  I once tried to read it many years ago and couldn’t get through the battle pages I’m ashamed to admit.  As I watched I kept wondering what my Russian born Mother would have thought.  I remember how much she criticized Dr. Zhivago. And all the time I was remembering her telling me the story of her Mother, my babushka (grandmother) Sophie (Sonya) Stachovich, a Princess in her own right, having played tennis with Leo Tolstoy when she was a teenager. Imagine possibly the greatest Russian author was a friend of my Mother’s family and played tennis with my Grandmother?  My Mother’s family were also very close to the Yusupov family (the son Felix killed Rasputin) so I watched very closely at the scenes filmed at the Yusupov palace. I was also mesmerised by the Tzar’s ball at the Catherine Palace I have visited in St. Petersburg. It took me a while to get accustomed to all the characters – there are so many of them.  The main ones of course are Count Pyotr (Pierre) Bezukhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and the beautiful Countess Natalia (Natasha) Rostov.  Yes I loved it but was dumbfounded to read the critics afterwards where I learned that The BBC had completely changed the ending.  The BBC version has a wonderful happy ending, not so the real ending.  How could that be?  Just to please the audience?  I also wonder what the Russians think of the BBC version of this masterpiece. I mean it’s a bit like Russian TV doing a series of one of Jane Austen’s books. Some of the series seemed just a little English to me but then of course the actors were English, except for Pierre. He by the way was fantastic. What I really loved too were the music, the costumes and the scenery, especially St. Petersburg in the snow and everyone skating on the river Niva; even wheel chairs with skates. 

St Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg, perhaps the most glittering location in the series

I told Eladio all about it when we went out to dinner on Friday night to La Vaca Argentina.  I think he would enjoy it too.  Unlike me, he read all of it as a teenager and when I told him the bit about the battle of Borodino and how the Russians refused to fight over Moscow using their scorched earth policy to drive Napoleon away, unable to get provisions, Eladio knew the Russian General in command was none other than the astute Kutuzov.  I do have a clever husband don’t I?

Yesterday was Saturday. Olivia had gone off to Valencia for the weekend and the house seemed very quiet.  This Saturday Zena, our ex Ukranian home help, was starting work with us at the weekends, to look after my Father whilst Salud has her time off.  After his fall we want him to be looked after properly and around the clock. She arrived at 3 pm and set to work immediately.  I think they will get on and I know I can rely on Zena who I like and trust.  As I mentioned to my Father she can cook good Russian fare too and I look forward to her making us some borsch or pelmeni.

And today is Sunday.  It is cold and sunny again.  We will be going to have lunch with our friends Benito and Loli today but of course I will be telling you all about that in next week’s post.  Meanwhile my friends, I shall leave you to get on with my Sunday.

All the best until next week

Masha

My Father, Charles Courtenay Lloyd and his 90th birthday.

My Father, "Daddy" in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid visiting me in 1979.
Hi again,

On Friday, 1st May, Labour Day, there was something big to celebrate. It was my dear Father, Charles Courtenay Lloyd’s 90th birthday who left England to live with us in Spain some 5 years ago.

My Father is the epitome of the true English gentleman who remains English despite his love of most things "foreign". He is in himself a gentle person who would never hurt a fly.

He was born in Tamworth England in 1919 in a genteel society as the son of an English vicar, my grandfather, John Lloyd, of Welsh extraction and from the island of Anglesy and of course of my grandmother, Dorothy Gertrude Scull a beautiful young pianist from Shropshire.

In short he was born just after the Great War and witnessed in his youth the worst depression in modern history, the Wall Street Crash. When his Father heard of a post with the Imperial Tabacco Company in Bristol through one of his rich parishioners he did not hesitate to remove him from the prestigious Clifton College school as jobs in those days were even scarcer than today.

In his spare time my Father went to evening classes to learn languages, his great passion and in his holidays always travelled abroad to places like Brussels or Geneva. Despite having left school early, thanks to his self learning, he gained a place at Cambridge University, at the Church of England patronised Selwyn College to study German and French.

However the war broke out and he had to curtail his studies to join the forces. He did however return later and finish them but adding Scandinavian languages due to his experience during the war and afterwards with Norway. His passion for both the languages and the countries has never ceased. Still today he speaks all 6 of his languages fluently, English, Russian, Norwegian, German, French and latterly Spanish.

He joined the Royal Navy and has still today a love of ships. Apparently it was his Father who urged him to join the Navy rather than the other forces as he thought his life would be somewhat less in danger. My mother always told us that on his first day, in his immaculate lieutenant uniform and in his very early 20’s, he remarked to an older plain sailor who was washing the decks: “the Navy makes a man of you” to which the sailor replied in his broad cockney accent “it makes a ******* monkey of you”. I’m not sure what the Navy during the Second World War made of my Father but it must have made him grow up before his time. To his merit I must add he got a medal from the King of Norway for his role in the liberation of Norway. The news was published in the newspaper at the time in England and I still have the clipping today.

I ought to add that before returning to Cambridge he spent some time in Germany with what was called the Control Commission in Schleswig-Holstein on the border of Denmark, the allied body that was supposed to catch Nazis on the run and help Germany back on its feet. I gather these were very exciting times for him.

After finishing his studies in Cambridge, he became a teacher of Russian under the famous Liza Hill*, or rather Dame Elizabeth Hill, the Professor of Russian at Cambridge University. She was “Aunty Liza” to me and also my brother’s God Mother. Liza had the task of setting up secret Russian language courses for the armed forces. This was the Cold War and it was obvious the courses were for teaching future spies. The story goes that Liza took him on even though he did not know Russian. She, a very eccentric character, urged him to use the same grammar book as his pupils but to be a few lessons ahead. He took the language learning very seriously and soon became absolutely fluent. At these courses he taught among the likes of Arthur Birse, Winston Churchill's former interpreter in Russia. Here my Father flourished professionally and personally and here he met my Mother, a penniless and homeless refugee princess of Russian origin, born Her Serene Highness Elena Lieven.

They married very soon and my late brother George and I were born at 62 Milton Road in 1955 and 1957. Those were very happy days for my parents.
Cambridge 1961, the four of us.
Soon the courses finished and my Father found work, once again teaching Russian but this time at the prestigious RAF College in Cranwell, a little village in Lincolnshire. My parents bought a small bungalow on one acre of land in the nearby village of Ruskington and my Father would bicycle to work on the flat Lincolnshire roads. This was where I spent part of my happy childhood until the age of 7 when we moved to Bradford in West Yorkshire where my Father got a post as a language teacher at Bradford Grammar School. Here he taught until retirement.

My Father taught me to look on the bright side of life and to enjoy the small things in life. I remember going with him to Manchester, that dark industrial town in the north of England, to the dentist, Mr. Car, a friend of my parents. I pointed out how ugly a street was and my Father said that he always looked for the beautiful things and not the ugly ones and that very often there was something beautiful to be found in ugly things. I have practised his philosophy nearly always and it has held me in good stead.

My Father is also someone who has lost nearly everyone dear to him in life and yet he stoically goes on, reading the newspaper, ordering books, going for his walks, enjoying his food and all the good things in his life.

When he was young, he lost his brother Raymond who died of polio at the age of 15 before the times of penicillin. That must have been a terrible blow and I gather my Grand mother never got over it.

His dear and very jolly Father died of a stroke in his early 70’s and later his Mother, in her late 70’s. That same year he lost his wonderful sister Gloria, my favourite Aunt, who died in an air crash with her husband, Uncle Derek and their 3 small children, Jacqueline aged 12, Michael aged 9 and Anthony aged 7. This was perhaps one of the most terrible things that ever happened to him and us. My mother told me that when he put the receiver down after that terrible phone call, he said “I only have you (as in our family) left”.

Many years later on October 1st 1999, my dear Mother died aged 79 of cancer at the Bradford Royal Infirmary. I still do not know how he went on without her and I know he misses her to this day, yet still he goes on stoically enjoying life. Maybe the picture of a fawn above his bed when he was a small child with the caption “be a good beast, suffer in silence” has something to do with it.

The next blow was my dear brother George who died, of cancer too, not long afterwards on 15th May 2001 in London at a hospice called Eden Hall which is a terrible name for such an institution.

4 years later, finally, my Father came to live with us and left his native England for Spain, a country he was very familiar with from our “Callosa days” in the 70’s. He was then in his mid 80’s.

Last October we also lost Sanya, George’s late wife in unfortunate circumstances and then just one month later, my Mother’s youngest sister, Masha, our impossible and amazing Aunt and sister-in-law whose death represented the end of an era.

Now my Father has only me left and I only have him left. They have all gone and we mourn them but we both have another wonderful family in Eladio, Susana and Olivia. Life goes on and thus we celebrated lovingly his 90th birthday on Friday as you can see in the photos I posted on Facebook.

The day started with a family breakfast in the dining room with the best finery we have. Here we gave him his presents, chocolates and a bonsai plant (the music centre is coming later!) and a special 90th birthday card I had asked my friend Amanda to bring specially from England.

My father enjoying his 90th birthday breakfast on Friday 1st May.
Lunch was to be much more important as we took him out for a birthday lunch to a new place we have discovered in Boadilla called De Brasero y Puchero with all his favourite things on the menu. The “piece de resistance” was the home made birthday cake we secretly gave to the waiter on arrival. A good time was had by all I think to judge by his comment at the end of Friday when he said “thank you for a lovely day”.

So happy 90’th birthday Daddy. Thank you for everything. May we all look and feel so young in heart, mind and body when we reach your age. I look forward to celebrating your 100th and have already had a look at the page at Buckingham Palace where you apply for a birthday message from the Queen!

Your loving daughter

Masha
* Liza Hill was a real character and I think had much influence over my parents, my Father specially. She was half English and half Russian and was born in Russia. She was the eternal spinster who finally took the plunge in her late 80's and married a Yugoslav she had known for many years. Amazingly and as a complete coincidence my Father bumped into them on their honeymoon at the bus station in Madrid!! I mean bussing your way round Spain in your late 80's as an Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University is extremely eccentric. Not long after, Liza divorced her husband as she probably could not tolerate sharing her life being so used to spinsterhood. More on Liza Hill in future posts.