As it happened, two of my granddaughters, Rhiannon and Morrighan, were visiting us here in Nice for the latest of my many birthdays. They had brought presents from Scotland from their mother, their brother and themselves which they presented to me at breakfast: videos of the Victoria series and the 2nd Upstairs/Downstairs series, and a book of crossword puzzles, and a swell summer polo shirt and a cardigan sweater, and 4 small bottles of single malt whiskey, and packages of Scottish shortbread cookies, and a pair of exquisite silver demi-tasse spoons that Silversmith Rhiannon had designed and made that dazzled me. I felt like a kid coming downstairs on Christmas morning.
After breakfast we drove across the border into Italy where we wandered through the open market in Ventimiglia: an acre of stalls and tables selling every imaginable cheese, sausage, salami, cold-cuts of one kind or another, every imaginable vegetable and fruit too, and hams, quails and rabbits, and wines, and banks of flowers, masses of flowers--you get the idea. The most stunning market I know about. You start salivating as you go in and don't stop until, laden down, you come out the other side.
We had lunch in a restaurant on the beach, looking out at the Mediterranean, what the Romans called "our sea", very blue, very calm today, a long, lingering lunch that finished with two tiny cups each of what is to me, the best tasting coffee in the world, during which Peggy and I asked ourselves for the millionth time: why is Italian coffee so much better than everyone else's. How do they do it?
We drove back to Nice, and in the evening we took the two young women to the Nice opera for a performance of Rigoletto. Strong competent singing from people you never heard of, a Romanian, a Mexican and an Italian: Mihaella Marcu, Jesus Leon and Federico Longhi in the three principal roles. Which left me once more brooding about at the richness of singers in the world, and in awe of Verdi, of the libretist Piave too.
When we had got home, the two girls brought out for me at our midnight snack a single small square chocolate pastry which they had secretly bought, now with a lit candle stuck in it, and that was my birthday cake and they sang to me as I blew out the candle.
One of the nicest birthdays I have ever had.
How to feel like a spoiled child though now, as of yesterday, 87 years old.