It seems appropriate to start writing this blog the day after my birthday – we will skip over my age… suffice to say I am still surprised by it!! My passions are my animals and painting.
So here is my painting of my boy Busta. I first started painting soon after I moved to Italy about twenty years ago… a friend started up a watercolour class, and I was hooked. Before Italy I had worked as a Weather Presenter at Sky News for 13 years; I had a lot of good friends there and I was sad to leave, but it was definitely time to go, especially as I had bought a house in Tuscany a year previously.
I actually took a sabbatical for 6 months to spend time here, and during that time, three delightful kittens were born to a wild mother in my back garden.
Clearly, she didn’t have enough milk for them, and I was soon feeding them. They became very precious… Gizmo was my boy, and the girls were Principessa Tiramisu and George – yes I got the naming wrong with George, but the name stuck anyway.
And I also have four wonderful dogs. They were not a plan, they just kind of happened to me as a result of being a volunteer at our local stray dogs’ kennels. The first one I brought home to save his life…. as his mother, pregnant when she arrived at the kennels, didn’t have enough milk, and he was about to die. He was less than three weeks old and needed to be given milk every 3 hours night and day. I only planned to save his life then find him a good home – but we fell in love!! As he was permanently hungry, I called him Bust-a-gut, not a good name choice in Italy, as most Italians cannot hear the difference between Busta, and basta, which means stop, enough.
Or worse still short for bastardino. And if you try to spell it out, it would appear that rather unfortunately I named him envelope or paper bag!! To be continued….
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