ENGROSSED...

This is not at all what I was going to post about today, but my June edition of Good Housekeeping magazine has arrived from Britain and I am engrossed in it. For some reason I didn't receive the May edition so I have been having withdrawal symptoms. I am not a "good housekeeper" at all, but the magazine is much more varied in content than the title would have you believe. I tend to read it from the back, rather as a man might read a newspaper, as I of course go to the cookery pages first. Then I reach the fashion [which often, but not always, depresses me; I think it does most women, given the youthful, unwomanly females we have to look at, but I'll let that be for now]. Then the articles - always interesting - and at last, the make-up section, which gives me hope!

The arrival of this magazine in my letter-box is a little glimpse of "home", and, although I don't want to live anywhere else now, sometimes it makes me a tiny bit nostalgic. I think it's the comparative calm of the British colours in almost every photograph that does it. The Mediterranean is so gloriously exuberant in colour! I suppose it's a similar feeling to the one I experience sometimes when I watch Sky or the BBC: "Oh, my gentle, understated country, where people are using umbrellas in late May!" - and where you can wear a long-sleeved item and even a jacket in summer. [One of the first things I had to do here was buy a new summer wardrobe : outfits which would do in Britain are simply not cool enough for a Sicilian summer.]

Sometimes I wonder how the colonial British managed as they did not have e-mail, or even very fast snail-mail and news from home came late. I suppose the answer is that they hardly embraced the foreign culture but lived sheltered lives in their own communities. The last thing I want to do is to live in an enclave of Brits - might as well have stayed in the UK! - but a little "touch" of home in the form of a magazine is sometimes welcome. I read the British Sunday papers online and of course , keep up to date via blogs, but , just as you want to read a book rather than reading online sometimes, it is nice, occasionally, to sit down with a British magazine. I'd like to be able to add "and a cup of tea" here but in truth, it is more likely to be a g & t!

Anyway, GH, Mslexia and Private Eye [though, as I keep saying, Dodo is funnier] keep me going! Incidentally, friends here are amazed at the irreverence of "Private Eye" when I show them the covers!

It occurs to me that I could "measure out my life" in the magazines I read at particular periods: let us pass over the time when my Dad was trying to show me the beautiful castles and lakes of North Wales and I just sat in the back of the car with my nose in "Romeo" and "Bliss" comics: after that I progressed to "Honey" magazine, then for a long while was a "Cosmo girl", was a "Spare Rib" woman in my strident feminist era and now find refuge in good old GH. Whatever next? Well, I shall wear the red lippy and matching shoes till I die so I don't think it will be one of those "comfy retirement" periodicals!

One more thing: a woman is writing in GH asking if it is OK to wash and re-use kitchen foil. Am I profligate in the kitchen and have I been missing something all these years because it truly has never occurred to me that you could do this?!

To those of you I normally visit: I'll be over tomorrow. Right now I have to go and read Sandi Toksvig on tennis and find out how to make a pork and pistacchio terrine.