Therapy.

We’ve all lightened up a bit momentarily, chiefly because the g’son returned to school quite normally Monday and is only grumbling in normal fashion about the exams they are being subjected to this week. H even asked his mum why she and I where so worried, which caused her to splutter rather. ‘But It’s over now for another three weeks,’ he said, reasonably enough. Forgive us, child, for being afraid of the subterranean rumblings in his unconscious - the sort that have caused psychosomatic illnesses over the passed two years.

Maybe he really is learning to cope. Apologies to the tiny counsellor in that case - now could she come and help us two poor raddled ‘grown-ups.’

To survive the horrors I’ve been reading a raft of girly pool-side books. Starting with Joanna Trollope’s “Friday Nights,’ which I hear on her site (my isn’t she a plummy Brit?) was inspired by her vision of the new importance of friendship between women in a fractured society where friends replace family. I moved to a similar, but more souffléd, theme in Carole Matthews’ ‘The Chocolate Lovers’ Club’ which caused me to eat a whole bar of Green & Black’s dark choc with cherry in one morning, so possibly should come with a health warning. I romped through Fay Weldon’s: ‘she my not leave’ (lower case for title because it’s written thus on the cover) which as often with her novels gives the initial impression of being predictable but has a scorpions’ sting in it’s neatly furled tail.

Finally I am just finishing something I never thought to read, Lauren Weisberger’s ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ which I’m finding more satisfying than the film. But that’s usually the way.

There may have been others, taken off now by my daughter for her own therapeutic binge, but I can’t remember them.

Between the marshmallows I’ve digested Karin Slaughter (what a name for a crime-horror writer!) ‘genesis’ (again the lower case title. It must be designer chic with the publishers at present.) That was a lot more readable than Patricia Cornwall’s ‘The Scarpetta Factor’ (upper case... should have known.. ) which I found almost impossible. maybe the timing in my life was wrong but it seemed to me to be full of the minutiae of legal, forensic, political, crime work, which slowed any story to a crawl and lost me completely. Hardly a single italian dish was prepared by the eponymous heroine in all 536 pages. I have come to expect at least a drizzle of extra virgin and some parmigiano reggiano from Scarpetta..