REHAB

I sent the link about Prospero's Kitchen out to the usual massed ranks of suspects and almost everyone wrote back thanking and asking for good news of my 'rehabilitation'. Very nice of them to enquire but isnt that interesting - Hong Kong, Oz, home counties, Yorkshire, London, New York - they all of telephathic synergy used 'rehabilitation' for the first time in their good wishes to me.

They have also all at one time or another visited/criticised/reeled back from/pleaded removal/etc this blog, so thanks for your interest!

Jardinerie Progress ~ I am sick to death of people asking the health of my 'mother's beautiful garden'.

I haven't the faintest idea.

I don't even peer down there

what little Kostas does is up to him. I just pay him his weekly €50 and even that is in jeopardy since my brother expressed no more than luke warm interest in splitting the fee. I don't fork out for myself and that 50 could be spent in 100 directions better.

Progress report on garden - here's a wheeze that might be quite fun to fool round with and fool the botany biddies into thinking I might be 'getting' the garden message.

Over the years I have taken various photos of the garden - sarcastic gestures, really, or perhaps I imagined myself wielding a ju-ju lens that infected and laid low anything i pointed it at. Whatever. After five years and eight months of loam-loathing servitude 'out there', there is not another second to squander on the things.

But for those who, knowing that i've never lifted a garden implement in friendship, still enquire brightly how the garden grows, here is their chance to catch up.

I have three albums in particular that are worth updating with snaps from the same angle to show the collapse and general shabbiness today.

General odds and sods but including a valuable record of the houses outside the gate as they took shape.

Smaller album of 49 but with shots of my mother and some juicy angles that will really ram the message home when the faithful see into what neglect les fleures and planty things have been allowed (nay urged) to tumble and crumble

Pièce de résistance ~ a splendid collection of over 80 snaps taken as far back as end July 2007 - three months after losing my girls' jewels, so my eye would have been sharp and vengeful - and ripe for editing into shape and bringing up to date with the 2012 'look'.

The marvelous system with this Google+ automatic updates is that those who've been put on the 'mailing list' because they at one time asked to see progress as my mother beavered away, now get to see the the reverse. I must try and root out snaps I took in each of the months since I stepped off that vile treadmill.

But what a splendid task and effective slap-down to asinine enquiries in that direction.

103 Sloane Street, London SW1. March 2006 ~ Two photos even more comforting than the 'cobwebs and decay' snaps I cam up with. These were taken by me in my mother's London apartment in March 2006, mere hours after getting off the plane from Seattle.

I sent copies to my daughters with a description of the trip and first impressions and here is Anna sending them back electronically with some shrewd comments.

"Your letter seemed so happy and looking forward. You had everything in front of you and you had read up about the caregiver job and you were going to make a new life.

I guess it all changed when you got there and you had to do gardening, too, and ya ya bossed you around and nothing youd looked forward to really came true."

Apparently, I'd also send a photo of another angle which clearly showed my jewel box which Anna had packed on top of the suitcase for me to easily get at.

Because my mother had been burgled in this very apartment - they waited round the corner in the back stairwell and then seemed to make easy meat of the three locks.

Each time I went out during my London stay, debated whether to carry the jewels on me or hide them somewhere. In the end, I plonked them in a small box which I placed on top of the book case.

The real irony, as everyone points out, is that I took precautions with my personal stuff in an apartment belonging to someone whose house over in Greece would prove the least secure of anywhere I'd encountered.

But the power of those photos is that they pre-date all the stress and bullying and the whole stinking culture of theft that stenched up the years that lay ahead. I can feel the hope coming from the photos, the eagerness of everything being new and possible.