1. Standing outside the loos in the restaurant where we had lunch was a wardrobe painted with the four seasons. Each one featured a mother and a child. In spring, summer and autumn the fat child is doing not much, but in winter it is poking wood into the stove.
2. Lou and I got back to the table to find that Rob had made friends with an English man who now lived in Austria. We chatted away for a bit about languages and he told us how he had once left his non-German speaking mother in his Vienna apartment. 'The cleaning lady's coming, but she doesn't speak English. You'll be all right won't you?' And off he went to work. When he returned that night, he asked his mother how her day had been. 'What a nice cleaning lady you have. But what a pity about her brother and his lung cancer.' So they had found a way to communicate after all.
3. The feeling of relief when you take off your stiff, too hot, too cold, rubby, achy ski boots for the very last time and slip your feet into walking boots that seem so light you could dance.
