The trouble with these long days of the English summer is that we often don’t finish working until gone nine-thirty at night (and it’s still light); Chris and I might play a few games of Backgammon or Chinese Chequers (are we dull?) and then there isn’t much time left for a film before bedtime. However, we don’t want to go straight to bed so we usually opt for a shorter programme, like the property programmes:- “A Place in the Sun – Home or Away”, “A Place in the Sun – Winter Sun” and “Location, Location, Location”. Chris has set our television to record all those Channel 4 property programmes and now there are hundreds of them on our hard-drive. Methinks perhaps we have been watching too many of them, after this morning’s strange conversation…

I was in still in bed at the time. Chris had brought in our cups of tea but I had been dreaming about mansions in Orlando and wasn’t quite awake enough to drink tea yet; so I stayed there, sleepy and dishevelled, with the duvet in disarray and covering my lower half. My little white vest had ridden up exposing my tummy. Now if you’re a regular to my blog you will know that I have put on weight since my return home to England, and the new, more confident me (much vaunted for two days or so upon my return) has all but disappeared; hence, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chris was obviously taken by the sight of my bare stomach. He stroked it and kissed it.

“Spectaculario!” he said enthusiastically in a more understandable (for us) version of the Italian “spettacolare”, the superlative used by an amorous designer Mary and I met in Bellagio years ago (our menfolk, bored with shopping, had stayed outside and missed the action).

“Really? Even though I’m so fat?” I asked (the old me, definitely).

“You’ve really got ‘the wow factor'”, Chris said rapidly in falsetto with an accent from the North of England (quite different to his public-schoolboy accent). He continued, “I noticed it as soon as I walked in. Wow! I always wondered what ‘the wow factor’ is and now I know!”

My eyes opened wide and I burst out laughing.

“And you tick all the right boxes,” he continued in his funny voice, “you see, you could have had ‘the wow factor’ but not enough bedrooms, then you would have ticked some of the boxes but not all the boxes…”

I can’t remember what else he said because I was laughing so much. Spectaculario!