In a move that has surprised us both, Tom has moved to Gibraltar. Mirinda Skyped Sophie this afternoon and was told that he has settled in to a Youth Hostel and has even managed to get a waiting job in a restaurant. He has threatened to go away for years and, it’s good to see, he finally got up and went. His independence is starting.
Of course, like any mother, Sophie has been clucking around him, making sure he’ll be okay, shoving money in his backpack, booking Easter accommodation to visit him, etc but, I think, she’s proud of him for going his own way.
Long gone is the young boy who took great delight in climbing all over me while we watched animated movies together. Oh, how I remember the number of times we watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Here’s one from 2011.
Mind you, I’d always miss bits because of the wrestling. And, of course, there were the many Jedi lightsabre fights we had in our back garden at Farnham.
I have doubted whether he’d actually leave home and here he is, flying his own route. Well done, Tom.
We left home today and flew over to Nicoline’s for fika. We had a lovely chat, coffee and cake. (That sounds like a trendy bakery – “Meet your besties at Chat, Coffee and Cake, you won’t be disappointed.” The icon could be some variation of three C’s.)
Anyway, we caught up with the last month, describing various aspects of Portugal, not always in the most glowing terms. We also discovered that, while in Angola, Nicoline only had bacalhau to eat and she hated it. She said it made a potato look good. Mirinda, obviously, agreed.
Here’s the one I had at The Fonz:
It was a variation on the traditional bacalhau-a-bras in that it was the same ingredients but in a different configuration. It also had some delicious string beans.
Back at home, for dinner, we had roasted cod which, while the same fish, is nothing like bacalhau. Which was a good thing as far as Mirinda was concerned.
