Well, I want to announce to the world that I am a nanna at last…to darling Harry James - a solid, easy name and no chance of its being mangled out of all recognition at school or on the playground. He weighed 4.2 kilos and was born at the unearthly hour of 4.37am. How anyone would choose to come and face the world at such a fragile hour I find hard to understand. I can just about look people in the face at 9.30am and not before consuming a bowl of porridge (now microwaveable) and a couple of mugs of coffee.

Harry was loved before I even knew him. He has kissable lips, as a friend of mine commented and punk rocker jet black hair which she considers ‘cool’. Nothing will flatten it except loads of bath water. Thank goodness he hasn’t inherited my hair gene – 365 bad hair days. My young one blames me entirely for her bad hair days but I defend myself when this sore point is thrown at me and tell her that she has also inherited a couple of good genes from me: a much improved version of my eyes, to start off with.

But to go back to Harry. I asked his mother and father to play Plain Chant for him. I’ve loved it since my school days and find it calming. Maybe it would influence him to such a degree, I argued, and he would eventually make it to the Vatican. Still, they played Mozart and Beethovan instead and no doubt, when I wasn’t about, all manner of modern music including Shostokovitch and John Cage, I am certain. Anyway, his mother told me that she doesn’t particularly want him to finish up at the Vatican and that maybe he won’t either.

On my Air Malta flight to London (I try to support our national airline whenever possible) there was our talented violinist Carmine Lauri going back to his London orchestra after his successful concert at the MCC and Sonya Kraal was going to England to visit her three children who live and work there. I was surprised to see tenor Charles Vincenti in his uniform of steward. I have seen him sing a number of times on both the Manoel Theatre stage and St James Cavalier’s. He told me he has been working with Air Malta for some 20 years and that is his full-time job. His next big singing role is that of Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the BOV Opera Festival in March. They kindly posed for a photo and I’m looking forward to L’Elisir.

It’s always such a pleasure being in the company of my darlings even when we don’t do very much. Just being with them, ‘sofaing’ and catching up with each other’s lives is happiness enough. Due to life’s circumstances I have been deprived of looking after anyone, even my children, for a number of years and I miss this. It is in a woman’s nature to be nurturing; to be preparing meals for the family and generally making their lives more pleasant. I never wanted to make a full time career of obsessively dusting dust gatherers around the house and preparing meals but doing it for part of the day gives me enormous pleasure and always has. It is sad to have no one to agree or disagree with; to ask whether it should be spaghetti or penne and would you like me to make a cottage pie? But there you are. It is best to try to be content with the circumstances in which we find ourselves. So, it was lovely being with them all.

My young one and her love proposed taking me to Brixton market to look at all the tropical fruit which I love, and away from the over-sanitised world of Saintsbury’s and Waitrose I was quite surprised at the cleanliness and organisation of the stalls. I also managed to find some ‘exotic’ ingredients, in one of the supermarkets. We bought papaya and mangoes at a very decent price and then went to have lunch at a small organic restaurant run by a British couple. Of course, I don’t believe in all this organic stuff and think it’s just a load of hype. It is not going to stop anyone from dying and is making a great many rich. I read in the British papers that over 100 restaurants in London were deprived of their licence because upon close scrutiny it was found by food inspectors or whoever, that they were not organic after all. I am not at all surprised at this discovery. But this particular place looked clean and the food appetizing and we had no illusions that by eating there we were going to add a number of years to our lives.

In the afternoon, my young ones proposed to take me to a completely different market. The Borough market near London Bridge. Whereas in Brixton there were very few white faces, at the Borough market there were very few which weren’t. It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon, an ideal afternoon for an almost totally outdoor market such as this. Everyone seemed to be munching away at something. There were stalls of French cheeses run by young Frenchmen; you could buy oatcakes from the Outer Hebrides, heather-fed lamb from the Orkneys, cheese blocks rolled in wild black desert thyme and there was an artisan kitchen run by a chap with a long ponytail. And a little stall ‘Supporting British Food’ and announcing the sale of ‘three very posh bangers in a row.’ I love British humour – outside those vulgar reality shows, naturally. This was a most pleasant day and in the evening, I yet again, decided that I would have to diet seriously once back in Malta.

I must start tomorrow.

I’ve given up making New Year resolutions ages ago. However, I made a rather unusual one this year. To write my Things To Do and shopping lists clearly so that I don’t have to spend 10 minutes trying to decipher what I had written. I must say, this has made my life slightly easier. But it means concentrating when I am writing and being ‘present’, not thinking of all the dozens of things that have to be done in order to maintain my life, which closely resembles that of a Franciscan nun.

Now, the hot water in the bathroom has again disappeared which means more plumbers, and more waste of time.

The hero of the week must be Wenzu Mintoff who, as you all know by now, appeared on Bondiplus last Tuesday and courageously said exactly what he thought about spin doctors, hidden agendas and the political leanings of Lou and bella compagnia. I was having a snooze contentedly snuggled up in front of the television, and next to the heater when all at once I woke up to find that docile, baby-faced Wenzu was thundering on about something or other. I often find these programmes totally soporific this is why I sit in front of them but not this one. Bondi was so annoyed at being challenged by one of his ‘guests’ in this way that Wenzu is being sued for libel, I heard on the Campus paperscan this morning. If I had had one at hand I would have enjoyed throwing a custard pie at Bondi. He was at his most insufferable that evening. But I tend to eat custard pies fairly quickly and generally have none waiting to be thrown at the television, lurking in odd corners of the fridge.

I suppose Where’s Everybody must have the occasional nightmare of being relegated to that utterly boring channel – Education 22 should there be a change of government.