Early this month we got the very sad news from our friend Bernie that his wife Anne had died, following her second liver transplant just before Christmas.  Anne was a fellow public sector accountant and I'd known her since the mid-nineties.  Bernie and Anne came out to see us when La Fulica was in Catania harbour in Sicily in August 2003, when we were in the middle of that fantastic hot summer cruising the Italian coast and islands.  They did us the great and very generous favour of paying for us to jojn them in the Villa Politi, a beautiful hotel with pool in Syracusa.  Later they came to visit us in Puglia.  Anne's liver failed catastrophically and without warning about ten years ago and she showed enormous courage and determination over her first transplant, which gave her another decade of active life.  She was such a force in life it's hard to comprehend she's no longer here and I'm sad we didn't see her more often in recent years. Last week my ex-wife...

November and December rolled on in much the same way as the rest of 2020, with our lives narrowed and simplified by Coronavirus.  I took this photo on one of my morning walks with Poppy, the weather bright and misty for a change, instead of grey and damp.  Sometimes I really miss those bright dry winter days in Puglia, where despite the cold wind if you can find a sheltered spot the sun starts to warm your bones. Every day I check out the infection and deaths data on the UK Covid dashboard and the international one maintained by the New York Times.  As the number of cases climbed relentlessly from early December it seemed inevitable there would be a new lockdown and Sue and I cancelled already tentative plans to spend Christmas in Devon with her sister Julie.  In the end we stayed home and had a Christmas not unlike the last one, gorging on duck, Netflix and Quality Street. Poppy has been oblivious to it all and such an enormous psychological asset over the last few ...