Happy birthday slovobooks!

Today is my Aunt X's 90th birthday, and all of her nephews and nieces have converged on Rapallo to take her out for dinner and generally celebrate. I just phoned her in the restaurant to say happy birthday -- caught them just after she'd been blowing the candles.

She's quite an amazing woman; I saw her last October and she was quite chirpy and flirting with a guy in the property office downstairs -- and insisting that he was flirting back. Which may well be possible, that is after all Italy and she does have a fairly noticeable personality. I didn't appreciate her as a kid -- partly because she never liked kids herself; but I've come to appreciate her more and more the older I get.

She was born during the I World War; she was in Dresden during the II World War when it was carpet-bombed (she was a volunteer with the Red Cross, though the way I've heard it, the real reason she was in Germany just then was that she was running after a young Luftwaffe officer -- but it could be gossip). She worked in the Italian Senate until her 80th birthday. At one stage around that time she had a 30-something lover, or so I'm told. And she always signs her cards "Zia X", which is in fact truly her initial. Discovering a few years ago that her second name is Anna was actually a nice surprise -- by then I had started appreciating her.

I wanted to put up a couple of pictures of her from last year, but they came out all horrible and they make her look old -- which would be all wrong because the point is precisely that in person she doesn't. I'm a bad photographer; and/or maybe it's her personality that does it. Anyway -- so I put up a couple of pictures from a long time ago, when she was considerably younger than I am now. ( After the cut )

Happy birthday james_nicoll!

Happy birthday mjlayman!