We had a dinner to celebrate Sally’s birthday, and also to celebrate the conclusion of Deborah’s editing of her professional development materials. Roast lamb and potatoes and carrots and a spice cake with coffee icing. And rather too much wine.

Deborah told us of her family reunion in Washington last October where she tried to tell her family about her life since Alan’s illness, her psychiatrist sister who couldn’t cope, her youthful trip to Israel when she fell in love with an Arab to her father’s shock and horror, Alan’s driving (awful apparently, even when he was well). The time she and Alan visited an old cousin of her father’s in Florence, only to discover that her father had been disowned by the family when he married a gentile.

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