It never fails.  The first night in a week when I am not sleeping on a floor and can get a little extra shut-eye, guess who comes home?  At 1 am?  I pretended it was just my brother knocking around the kitchen, but my brother wouldn’t come into my room, sit on my bed, and simultaneously blow smoke into my face and shake me, using a tone of voice one would associate with the house being just a tiny bit on fire.
    “Sweetie, where is the sugar?”
    “Lovely to see you as well.  Must have missed the telegram announcing your arrival.  We are out of sugar.  G’night.”
    “All I need is a bitty little spoonful.”
    “Vivvie, you use a ladle…sweet holy mother, what is that smell?  It’s like the walking dead!  You reek of it!  It…it’s…cheese, isn’t it.”
    “Can’t get a decent cheese here.  Weather is lovely, it’s possible to find an edible baguette, and the cheese situation is positively barbaric.  The restrictions on importation are ridiculous.”
    “Why stop at foul, why not bring home something illegal?  Agh.  There’s a tin of condensed milk in the fridge.  Use that.  Good night.”

The next day, after I brought home sugar and tea, I found that she’d rearranged my entire work space and ripped out the progress I had made on the fulled crochet bag.  There was a note with various measurements, a rough schematic, and “spending summer in Scandinavia, promise to bring back herring cheese.”
For the record, herring cheese is on my “no thank-you” list, but that’s our girl for you.  Why bring home, oh, a jar of lingonberry preserves or a brick of Finnish chocolate when she can bring back something only she will enjoy? 

…aka Viv on holiday. She is dearly attached to civilization and all its accoutrements. If our ability to accessorize is what separates us from the animals**, then Viv’s capability to have a complete hot breakfast done to her liking whether she is in the middle of Kenya or on the Glastonbury Tor is what separates her from the rest of the pack. It’s veddy British of her, but I don’t know why she bothers, as she is rarely up before noon and generally prefers to breakfast on dry toast and the hair of the dog(s) that bit her. She certainly doesn’t wear even a quarter of what she packs, what with all the shopping. I was a Girl Scout, I know what it is to be prepared, but I managed to get around western Europe with minimal baggage (Viv would point out that I also looked like a guttersnipe and should have gotten some packing tips from the Brazilian girls). As for where she is, I’d certainly like to know. That tramp took off shortly before I had a disaster of the fulled variety: 5 skeins of SWTC Karaoke, complètement en ruine. Normally, faced with such…distasteful… results, I would have just had a cup of tea and made plans with a pair of sharp scissors, but this was a design for an upcoming book and I was already behind schedule. The editor is willing to go with a different design and after several pots of tea and a long cold bath, I have worked up a schematic and a pattern and now I must get over my fear of fulling. That a pot of hot water and a handful of baking soda would fill me with such dread…*sigh*. I do wish the clove-smoking red-hennaed tart would put down whatever foul swill she is drinking and give me a call. If she doesn’t call or come home soon, I’ll hope that she’s sucking down enough salmiakkikossu to temporarily blind her. Although, as it is summer, she’s probably consumed enough gin & tonic to keep malaria at bay (do not try this at home – Viv is a muse and can do this without harm; the volume of g&t you would need to ingest to prevent malaria would…well, you wouldn’t have to worry about malaria anymore, because you’d be dead).

Vivvie, if you are reading this, get back here. I have a roll of freezer paper and an upcoming gallery show to submit to.

*Chorus, Henry V, Shakespeare
** Steel Magnolias?