Speaking to myself

One of the reasons I started to write a blog was because my daughter thought it was a good idea. In fact she set it all up otherwise I would never have done it, because let's face it I thought who on earth would want to read all my waffle and random thoughts?
It's been going on nearly three years now and I love getting all the feedback and belonging to a blogger's world, it makes me feel less alone. The downside of moving abroad for whatever reason is that you discover what it feels like to be alone, to be among people who have no idea who you are. Coming from a family with lots of aunts and uncles and cousins that I loved so much this was a strange situation for me, especially as two of them passed on within six months of my leaving, causing me a life time of regret. I've spent a lot of my life missing loved ones, probably the first and greatest shock was my brother going off to boarding school when I was eight and he was ten. One minute we were rolling around on the carpet and giggling at every silly thing and the next I was on my own, becoming more serious and alone.

I didn't mean to say any of that, it just came gushing out. My blog is an outlet for my pourings out in English. My English speaking friends and I meet up on Fridays for coffee and gabble away in our seventies time warp English, using out- dated phrases like, ' he's a bright spark, it's smashing, she's very keen on him,' mixing up our English with Italian, 'I didn't want to do it for scaramanzia,  your daughter is good at ginnastica' happily understanding each other perfectly and oblivious to grammar mistakes.

The only person I speak to who lives in an English speaking country, well, England, actually, is my brother on Wednesdays. He's a bit in a seventies time warp too though because sometimes even I can teach him a new expression, he didn't know what a jolly was, like me he thought it meant happy and cheerful, but no, I have discovered reading Jane's blog that it means doing something really nice as part of your job, so free.

What I was really going to tell you today is that I lost my voice, it's the sudden change in temperature you see, one minute I was striding round the lake in a tee shirt, revelling in the feel of the warm spring sunshine, the next a breeze came along, aria, the Italians call it and the next day no voice.
Apart from that I felt fine so I went to meet the afore mentioned English speaking friends and thought it would be a nice change for me to have to listen, being as that I love the opportunity to talk in English and feel sometimes that I can tend to hog the conversation. So I learned a lot of things and really enjoyed listening, but I do listen anyway it just might seem that I don't.