I was talking to my mother (alias Supergran) beside the racks of freshly baked bread at Lidl in Newton Abbot when it happened. My hand was reaching for a bread bag on the shelf underneath the French baguettes while Mum was two feet away checking out the pizza rolls and bruschetta novelties (and asking what they were) when suddenly an arm appeared between us.

The arm was long and brown, and tattooed on the shoulder and biceps. The arm shot out so quickly, and was so close, that I couldn’t make out the design of the ink illustration. The one thing I knew for sure was that it was young, smooth skinned and… muscular! The fine hairs on the sun-tanned arm glinted gold under the neon lights in the bread aisle as it stretched towards the baguettes.

“Excuse me ladies,” said a male voice.

My eyes followed the arm up to his face. He was perhaps twenty-four, had blond curly hair cut neat and short, and he wore a small beard on his chin. He grabbed a baguette, already in cellophane, and withdrew his arm. There was an empty space where the arm had been and Mum and I were left staring at one another.

I wondered what Mum was thinking… Would she comment on the tattoos and the rude intrusion? I hoped she wouldn’t tell him off in a Supergran manner. Well, he did excuse himself.

My ninety-five year old mother, dumbfounded and wide-eyed, paused for a long moment as she made sense of the arm and how to respond. At last she found her voice. 

“WOW!” she exclaimed sufficiently loud to draw attention from all the shoppers in Lidl, including the young man who was by now past the bread ovens.

The blond turned and smiled a lovely white smile before dashing off in embarrassment. I don’t expect he finished all his shopping in Lidl last Saturday.

It was a beautiful sunny evening and I was hosing the flowers on our small balcony on the road side of our house. Each summer I have a nice display of flowers and sometimes I hear the passersby on the pavement as they make approving comments, however, this evening the comments were coming from our side of the wall. Our friend Roland (recently over from Australia and well known to many of my readers as “the bird-man of Brisbane”) had taken a beer and a cigarette to the top of the steps by our front gate, perhaps to enjoy seeing the world pass by and exchange greetings (or meet more birds).

Whilst I was still engrossed with my watering, our friend Jo appeared on the steps of Alan’s house two doors up (Jo is going out with Alan’s daughter Caroline); Jo was going up with hose in hand to water Caroline’s flowers on her balcony and we struck up conversation.

“Your flowers look beautiful, Sally,” called out Jo.

“Thank you,” I responded, “it’s been a really good summer for the flowers this year… apart from those ranunculus plants we all bought. Only one of mine survived. And to think how pretty and promising they looked at first.”

“Oh, they were rubbish. All of Caroline’s have gone,” Jo said, hosing the glorious geraniums which replaced the rubbish ranunculus plants, “but the weather is perfect for the flowers this year. So much sunshine!”

“My petunias are excelling… and the marguerites. I don’t think they’ve ever been better. Last year it was the agapanthus. Each summer seems to favour a particular flower over others,” I agreed.

“I find the dandelions always do well at my place,” Roland said wryly from his position above us at the gate.

There is never a dull moment with Roland around.

And here are some cute photos of a couple of up and coming gardeners in my family…

“You’ve lost weight!” I said to Dave the builder as I was hosing my plants on the terrace this morning.

Shirtless, Dave was adding the finishing touches to the new railings he had built on Catherine and Martin’s balcony at Number Seven, two doors down from us.

“Well,” Dave smiled, turned off his radio and stopped working briefly to explain, “I couldn’t get into the suit I bought new two years ago so I wasn’t going to buy a new one… and I’ve been on a high protein diet recently. No carbs. I’ve lost between one and a half and two stone!”

“You look good,” I said encouragingly, “like James Bond coming out of the water!” (I know, I may have exaggerated a wee bit – Dave is in his fifties and completely bald.)

“Which one?” he asked.

“Daniel Craig,” I laughed, “but wouldn’t Sean Connery be alright, too?”

“Are you sure you’re not thinking of the one with the cat?” modest Dave stroked an imaginary cat in his arms.

“Oh, Blofeld!” I chuckled as an image of bald Telly Savalas entered my head.

We both laughed – patently, without his beard Dave could have been the Kojak actor’s double. Dave turned the radio back on and picked up a nautical-looking rope, which was to make the balcony rail appear like a handrail on a ship. Still musing on the mental image I went back to my hosing. 

I didn’t tell Dave I used like the bald actor when I was a girl in the seventies and he brought out that romantic LP. Telly had such a lovely deep voice that he had only to speak-sing to bring out the goose pimples. Funny how men hate Telly Savalas’s singing!

Facebook Messenger may be a great way for finding old friends and acquaintances and keeping in touch but can you trust it? With surprise I opened the Messenger app this morning to find that one of my new friend requests was from an old girlfriend of my brother Henry. Being rather dubious I clicked on the photo icon for a closer look and, sure enough, it was the same Janice to whom I was introduced several years ago.

“It can’t be…” I said to Chris who was having coffee with me on the terrace, “I have a friend request from Janice.”

“Janice?” Chris had never met her.

“Yes, Henry’s ex-girlfriend. They went out for a few months but it didn’t work out even though she was a really nice lady. Sadly, later she became ill and died of cancer about four years ago,” I explained.

“Terrible,” agreed Chris.

“Someone must have stolen her identity,” I suggested.

“Or perhaps she’s in Internet purgatory, desperately trying to get in touch with friends on Facebook!” my husband quipped.

It puts a new twist on Facebook being regarded as a good medium!

I had looked like hell in the mirror a couple of hours earlier so I was certain that I looked equally as ill when I established myself at the end seat, opposite the luggage rack, on one of the front carriages of the train heading for Exeter St Davids. In spite of my fading Australian tan, my face managed to be a sick white with some red blotches – on cheeks and around my eyes – and a sort of purplish colour on my lips; I had a temperature and had long since taken off my coat and cardigan, although it must have been cold because it was a rainy day and everyone else wore a coat.

My palor and my cough had kept me in a kind of quarantine on the previous train, from Brighton to Salisbury; even though there were more passengers than seats, nobody attempted to sit next to me. At one point earlier on, when their were a few odd empty seats, but not together, an old couple boarded and sat behind one another on the aisle seats more or less opposite me.

“I’m sorry, I’m not well,” I said leaning forward, “I’d offer you this seat… but then I’d have to sit next to someone else and spread my infection.”

The old man stared at me searchingly and smiled.

“He doesn’t understand. We’re German,” his wife turned around with a knowing smile.

“And I have germs!” I perked up a bit.

I think the wife saw the funny side. She whispered to her mann and he nodded enthusiastically.

The Salisbury to Exeter train was a different kettle of fish; a plush new train, smooth, quiet and so warm that all abandoned their coats; there were plenty of vacant seats, lots of tables and loads of legroom, even in my preferred seat at the back where I had hoped not to disturb or be disturbed.

Too tired to read after my restless night, I plugged my earphones into my Kindle and began to listen to Candide, by Voltaire (the Kindle reader’s American high-school girl voice doesn’t do justice to French words and names but it was mildly amusing trying to make sense of the strange pronunciations). A few minutes later, at about chapter six – after Candide has been thrown out from the castle, fought for the Bulgarians, met up with his philosophy master who had been hung and left for dead, and reunited with the girl who had led to his being thrown out in the first place (Candide rows along very quickly) – the train guard came along and asked to see my ticket.

“I have a theory,” said the blue-eyed and smiley-faced Northerner, “I reckon that lovely skin has something to do with the water. Do you live in Torquay?”

“No, Dawlish, but I was born in Australia,” I dashed his theory.

“Well, I hope you don’t mind me saying that you have lovely skin,” he continued without appearing too dashed.

Needless to say, I wasn’t offended at all and, before long I took the earphones out and closed the Kindle; in fact, I had perked up a bit.

The guard wasn’t so much handsome as full of fun. He did the odd bit of dashing off to click tickets, deal with queries and open doors for passengers, then he’d come back to my seat and perch on the edge of the seat next to me (I was by the window). He told me which are the best seats for the open-air opera at Verona, and the best place to go for a good beer in Bavaria; he spoke of the vineyards on the banks of the Rhine, near Lorelei Rock and knew the legend of Lorelei the mermaid siren. Occasionally, he burst into Italian and German. Germs and Germany again! But I felt a lot better.

“We like to travel,” I used the married we, to let him know.

“You’d be a great travelling companion. I’d love you to come to Verona with me,”  he said, “but your husband wouldn’t!”

A little before we arrived at Exeter St Davids station, the final destination for our beautiful new train, the guard came back to wish me goodbye. He gave me a peck on my now perhaps less pale cheek.

Chris was waiting for me at Dawlish station. He held me tightly in his arms and kissed me on my cheeks. We hadn’t seen each other for four days… but there were those germs. I told him about the nice guard who had cheered me up during the long journey.

“Let’s get you home. There’s a cauliflower-cheese ready for you…”

There’s no place like home. 

Penny, too. had a cold

Stones, stones, stones! Recently everything has been about stones! How peculiar!

On the train back from Brighton yesterday I picked up my Kindle for inspiration and spent a few minutes reading the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Fascinatingly, in 1658 the famous diarist was “successfully cut for the stone on March 26th” (my son’s birth date – no stones to date, happily!). Forty years later, after not a peep, the stones broke out again and were to trouble Pepys for the last three years of his life (upon post-mortem examination seven stones were found in his ulcerated left kidney). Then the guard came and I put my Kindle away…

In bed last night I was slightly bemused to read in the paper that Yoko Ono has lost a stone – or rather, had it stolen – from her interactive installation at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum. The much missed pebble, signed and bearing the words Love Yourself , was one of a number of stones, “worn by water and time” (aren’t they all?), on which Yoko had written small but presumably meaningful messages. Ah… How…  How vapid. And what happened to “Love thy neighbour”? If you’re going to write messages on stones, and value them at £12,400 each, surely there are better things to write; not to mention the fact that people around the world are still being stoned to death. But maybe Yoko has addressed that issue in her exhibition. I don’t know.

Oh Yoko

Then, of course, there are all those stones lost by dieters; in particular, a lady called Alison who has lost ten stones on the Juices+ Diet – my present diet. We’re modern – we are Online dieters. No, we don’t eat virtual food (although I used to say that I ate virtually nothing); we substitute two meals with shakes and eat a sensible meal once a day. I have been sticking to the new regime for just over two weeks and I’ve lost… No, not a stone worth £12,400 but mere pebbles in the region of five pounds!