Some charity here, fellows - she could have been brought up really strictly, been pressed into being prim and proper and always wearing white gloves at the right time and a hat that looked like a pudding basin with a ribbon round it - then married to a ponderous and pontificating neighbour's son and become the ideal little wife and just so mother and then took up the round of meetings and club nights once the children were grown.

Now she might be out on her own and has got an awful lot of mischief to catch up on and suspecting that there is only a little while to do it in.

People can be like home made wine - sometimes you get five bottles of dull little table wine and just one where there is a sudden effervescence and a dangerous flying cork.

Sure it takes your breath and leaves you with a racing pulse - and it might not even be very good wine - but the world would be a lot more boring without wicked old ladies.

Not that I'm one, of course, but I am far more likely to annoy people than I was forty years ago.

Anne the Pleater :ootd: