The phone rang and the Princess answered. I heard her end of the call. “Yes” she said tersely followed by an equally terse “no”. Then she handed me over the phone. It was my sister calling from America. “Did you feel that your niece was overjoyed to hear your voice?” I asked. “Was it exciting to be greeted by someone so audibly delighted to pick up the phone?” The Princess looked at me balefully and said, “Sarcasm is wasted on the young, you know.”
Siblings
On holiday
Belgianwaffle wanted to leave you all a post to let you know that she is on holiday and won’t be posting for about 3 weeks. However as our mother would say “the day ran away with her†and she didn’t have time to leave her faithful readers this information.
Watch this space for holiday memoirs and dozens of photographs.
Belgianwaffle’s sister
Travel Plans
No, not mine, my sister’s.
She has resigned from her job and will finish at the end of August. As she worked pretty much every day for months, she feels she needs a break. And as her pay levels reflected her commitment, she has sufficient funds not to need to look for a new job until January. In the interim she will be in the South of France, Rome and Mexico in September, in the South of Spain for October and in Chicago and Hawaii in November.
All I can say is that I hope she’ll be able to fit in some babysitting time for me at some point. No, no, of course I’m not bitterly envious.
Who will import my Mariage Frères’ Lapsang Suchong Jelly from Qatar now?
I am sad. After 18 months in Dublin, my sister is leaving. She doesn’t like her job and she doesn’t like Dublin. But I loved having her in Dublin. You only really appreciate speaking to your sister face to face when you can’t do it. Sigh. I went around to her apartment the other night and she gave me lots of things. She will be travelling for a bit so anything I don’t take will go into storage. I am a bit of a minimalist. She is a maximalist. I can fit all my make-up in a small bag. She has a walk in wardrobe filled with make-up. I now have a large plastic bag full of extraordinary stuff. I have super regenerating pseudo science serum night cream. She only gave me it on condition that I promised not to use it as day time moisturiser because then the world would end. I have 6 packets of boil in the bag rice (it was on special offer), “storage solutions”, a new coffee table, honey drenched nuts, a Wrigley’s picnic rug – waterproof on one side – and 10 other bags full of things. But I’d rather have my sister here all the same.
I am, of course, keen that she should be happy; I just wish that she had been happy here.
Toasty
My sister is just back from another couple of weeks in the Gulf. She tells me that she couldn’t take a shower in her apartment complex because the cold water was coming from outside. And, as it was 52 degrees outside, the cold water was quite a lot warmer than the hot water. And she was there for the hottest day in Doha in 40 years. Lovely.
This inspired my mother-in-law to tell me a story about her friend who lives in the Gulf and who can’t use her swimming pool most of the year as the water is too hot and they can’t afford the expensive mechanism to cool it down.
Other little snapshots from the Gulf, my sister visited a shopping centre where there are canals and gondolas, she saw a woman in a burka eating spaghetti and she visited the local Pain Quotidien where she picked up some Belgian chocolate spread for me. Odd, very odd.
Hot, hot, hot
My sister is in Qatar for work. It is 48 degrees. She was outside for ten minutes and a) got sunburned and b) had to take off her watch as it was starting to burn her wrist.