Treats!

One of my lovely new friends in Bedford spent six weeks over Xmas with her parents in India. Last week included her birthday and so she redeemed a gift voucher for a wine and cheese pairing experience organised by the Essex Wine School – Who knew! What a lovely idea!
Today she invited six friends for lunch at her home in a village 30 minutes from Bedford and treated us to a home-cooked biryani. I was really pleased to meet her friends, a musician/actor who has very similar tastes in music and films to mine, a GP born and raised in Fermanagh by Indian parents from Malaysia and Singapore respectively, a teacher who has been a foster-parent and who has adopted her last foster-child, a decade or two younger than her own three, and a former teacher who has reinvented himself as a drystone waller and is the only one of his kind this side of the imagined line between Weymouth and The Wash. These last two are also hosting a refugee parent and child from Ukraine.
I felt so privileged to be included in such a group – the polar opposite to the people I work for.
I brought a rather nice bottle of wine and a little basket of dwarf narcissi in bloom as a gift to my host, though forgot to photograph them before setting off. I was overwhelmed to be given these treats she had brought back from India for me – a notebook handmade from recycled cotton rags, a carved and painted little wooden elephant, and the most bling-encrusted pen I have ever held.