viola's people watching blog
Our neighbour’s ancient cat has come to sit under our apple tree and soak in the rays of early spring sunshine. It’s an old tom that does absolutely nothing. Honey bees buzz around him, nuzzling into the early orange blossoms and he nods his head as sleep clouds his eyes […]
I read an article in The Guardian just after New Year, about making New Year resolutions. The writer…I don’t remember his name…said he never makes such resolutions because…the I that has to execute the resolutions refuses to take orders from the I who made them. I stopped calling them resolutions […]
Brussels was cold and teeth chattering and we walked around with frozen faces and numb noses and other frigid extremities. But the city was busy and bustling…streets strung with Christmas lights, shops windows displaying sleek tailored garments on long-legged mannequins and coffee shops, jam-packed and bursting at the seams. Brussels […]
We’ve been hoarding an unbelievable amount of stuff from clothes and shoes to magazines and books and makeup and gifts of lipsticks and vials of perfumes and bits and bobs and odds and sods that were blocking the free flow of all this cosmic energy. I read somewhere that if […]
Do you remember in one of my previous posts how I cautioned against swaggering remarks and how my old uncle used to say that someone up there was always listening in and would have the last laugh on us? Well, I have yet another confession to make. I used to […]
Life is a journey. We’ve heard this one before and one too many times and it seems like some glib phrase to impress…but… it rings true…every word of it. For me the journey is all about the little things in life that poke me in the ribs and laugh in […]
I sought freedom, to liberate myself from a certain thought and habit that had surfaced like a demon during these dark and dour months, when the sky frowned and furrowed its brows and the rain came in starts and stops. The problem was…my washing. In warmer drier months, it’s a […]
My rose bush of little white roses, a hybrid variety, forced into domestication, to sprout flowers perfectly shaped and to blossom in spring and early summer…has succumbed to the call of its untamed beginnings. Under the Cretan sky with the frigid breath of the icy mountain ridges and the salty […]
Two weeks before Christmas I was soaking up all that festive cheer, sauntering in the streets and stopping in front of shop windows and admiring the season’s apparel on skinny, long-legged, small-waisted manikins. They were wrapped in clothes of emerald green, the ones that glide over your body as you […]
The grey skies had been pouting and threatening to pour it all down when I called my friend last Friday to ask whether she wanted to resume our sulky weather habits…to sip on some alcoholic beverage to warm our chilly bones and just catch up…we’re always catching up and I’m […]