...Brian and bagpipes...

It took 5 days and £400, but we got Ants back by Friday, just one day after our mate Brian from Melbourne. Brian is a musician by trade and a teacher by profession. I used to go hear him play every Wednesday at the Dan, just on the off chance that he'd sing a song called Pallet on your Floor, which I love, and am now working on a version of for recording. Ants and I got to know him when he ran the Dan's Sunday session, and famously prophesised when we got together that "it's not love, you're in lust, it'll never last". Ha.


Brian is now teaching in Kuwait, and arrived with three of his teacher chums: Amelia and Debbbie from South Africa and Maureen from Queensland. The girls turned up begging for directions to the nearest bar and, after 2 months in staunchly Muslim Kuwait, demanding sausage, bacon and beer! Brian and I had dinner at ours and pointedly noted somewhere into the second bottle of wine that "this would never be allowed in Q8"... what he meant was that never in a million years would he be allowed to visit a married woman while her husband was out, and, once it was known he'd stayed overnight (even on the couch), "They'd be out the front waiting with pebbles for you in the morning". It's another reminder of how far women still have to come in many parts the world. (Or rather, how much MEN still have to learn!)


Brian also brought cheerful confirmation that we are indeed the only english speakers in our street and perhaps the whole block. "I stopped at the cafe up the road and said I was staying with some friends who live here, and the lady said oh, the tall blond man and his wife'..."


Friday night brought session-ey goodness with the Irish music Italians we are getting to know at a pub in town. Surprise surprise, Brian was a hit. We filled the weekend with food and wine and music and chatter and wandering around a stack of old stuff - Ants and I are getting quite good at this tour guide thing. All too soon ,it was time for them to head back to the middle east. But we cant wait to see them again.





The following weekend we kicked off the festive season a little early, with the St Andrew's Day ball of the Caledonian Society of Rome (who knew Rome even had such a thing!?), run by a colleague of mine who happens to have been the president for the past five years. Only at the UN, surely. It was a cracking good night - I'd dragged along our new Aussie chum Kate (recently out of WFP North Korea), and she brought one of her interns. We all looked gorgeous and danced lashings of ceilidh. And it was pretty exciting to have new friends to share our adventures, because despite the pipers, there were plenty of reminders that we weren't still in Kansas, Toto... The food was italian, and the drink of choice was prosecco. On the upside, there was enough of the Water of Life to ensure that the local Presbyterian minister was far too pissed to drive us all home. We all piled into his Tarago anyway, accepting his assurances that God would look after him in this holiest of cities...although I did seriously consider getting out when he drove the wrong way up the offramp for the motorway.


Next morning - erm. okay, it was afternoon - we hauled ourselves down to meet a former London colleague of mine, and his lovely partner, who is a Kiwi. It was worth every scrap of early post-prosecco agony. We had a lovely time with Keith and Yvonne, meandering through the Christmas market at Piazza Navona, the Campo dei Fiori, and I finally remembered where the bus goes from that takes you up to the top of the Janiculum Hill and the Garibaldi monument. Then we went for dinner in Trastevere, in a restaurant with enormous steaks and huge slabs of seafood on ice in the windows and front display cabinets. Maybe not the classiest invitation to dinner, but the meal was memorable, as was the company. Keith was one of my earliest mentors when I was first promoted back in the day, and this plain spoken big bear of a man has a heart of gold. It was good to be able to both brag a little at how much I'm enjoying the job, and living "abroad", while acknowledging the hard stuff - the challenges of playing backstop for Ants, who is still finding his feet, the complexities of paperwork and the uncertainty around contract renewals. For his part, Keith readily supplied all the best of the office gossip from the last 5 months, and told us the story of Keith and Yvonne. I love it when two people with some years more living than we do, discover each other - its totally romantic. We headed off into the night with embraces and seasons greetings and it really does feel as though the festive season has already begun. Roll on.