I’ve spent the morning away with the fairies. Once again my clever sewing friends from Doha have inspired me, and after seeing what they have been busy with, I too am attempting a quilt. Well two, I am doing two at once. So, I have spent the morning cutting and ironing in preparation for sewing on four more little fairies.

Outside it is dreich, drizzly and foggy, and amazingly skeins of geese seem to be returning. Surely, being only January the snow and hail are not finished with us yet?

John has been clambering about in the attic attempting to fix a leak in the roof. I was appalled when I alerted him to the little drip through the ceiling that I saw a while ago, and his abrupt reaction was, ‘I couldn’t give a monkey’s…’! He is usually so quick to fix anything that is amiss. Well, the mood must have taken him and the dripping has stopped and all is well, so ‘Let it rain,’ I say.

And smells. I am overwhelmed with the essence of peppermint. Last night I decided that my feet needed a good massage with peppermint oil. It is supposed to be very good and invigorating for tired feet, so I tipped the bottle up, totally forgetting that I had removed the little stopper at the top that only allows one drip at a time and the whole lot spilt everywhere. I couldn’t sleep for hours. The potion must have invigorated my brain as well as my heels and toes.

So, from a night of dark insomnia, I was consumed with thoughts of Dante.

I sat in class on Friday learning all about this great poet and writer who lived seven hundred years ago, who wrote with such passion for his one true love, Beatrice, ‘She is no woman, but one of the most beautiful of Heaven’s angels’. He didn’t write at all about his wife.

Then we looked at canto V of the Inferno, which dwells on the story of Paolo and Francesca. They were adulterers, murdered by the husband and so were in hell. Their punishment was to be blown around for all eternity in a ‘hellish hurricane, that never rests’. Their sin was that they hadn’t controlled their passions. They should have listened to reason, and now their souls were blown in hell like the murmuring of starlings. He also alludes to cranes and doves, when summoned by desire, borne forward by their will, through the air… Our tutor was full of praise for these ancient poets who write so tellingly of blossoms and birds as though they actually observed them, but he doubts if Wordsworth would know one end of a daffodil from another!

And in the next stanza, one of the great lines of Dante:

‘There is no greater sorrow than thinking back upon a happy time

in misery.’ Perhaps another way of describing old age!

Anyway enough of hell and infernos, but it all seemed to be related to the play we saw in Edinburgh on Saturday. It was ‘The Lover’ from the book of the same name by Marguerite Duras. It was about the author’s youth in Vietnam when she, as a fifteen-year-old girl crossing the Mekong Delta in the summer in 1929, first catches the attention of an older Chinese man. Their torrid affair was portrayed in a single set on stage through the medium of ballet with sinewy bodies swirling and writhing about, but it was all so beautiful, sensuous and poignant. We came away feeling quite touched by the fusion of music, words and evocative dance. The play ended with the disembodied voice of the woman’s lover, calling her decades later, just to tell her he had always loved her. Hence my thoughts of Dante: ‘There is no greater sorrow than thinking back upon a happy time in misery’.

Here in Fife the sparkling snow has gone, and only fog and rain persist.  Walks are muddy and the countryside is bleak. We did walk down by the Water of Leith yesterday

revisiting our old haunts in Stockbridge and Edinburgh, and I bought some crab claws.

Huge monster things. So now I must be gone to conjure up the chilli sauce that will do them justice. Last week we feasted on langoustines, and when I told Natasha what was on the menu, she said, ‘Who’s coming?’

‘No one,’ I said, ‘just us!’

Bon appetite!