A cold front swooshed in from nowhere, literally. Sitting in the garden for breakfast and next thing you are looking for your mittens. That kind of cold front.

My Heidi Klum colleague will have the heating turned up high in the office because apparently Heidi never wears cardigans or jumpers. Ah, she is lovely, really, we have a good relationship for the two hours overlap most days. We talk, about our kids and about neck strain and of course about the boss. She does all the things I always failed at, yesterday her fingernails were Nile green (so she told me) and last week there were tiny pink and blue striped bows painted on them. I am not kidding. And she is Blond, whereas I have always only been blond and now I am sort of pale-grey-blond-straw whatever. 

My Heidi Klum has multiple matching wrist-watch-earrings-necklace-arrangements that could make me drool were I so inclined. 

I vaguely remember a time when I used to wear jewellery, pick earrings out of a box every morning and so on. What happened? I gave away the last of my Bollywood bangle stash to S this summer. And I gave her the pink mother of pearl thing from Mona. She is old enough now to take care of it and not lose it and maybe get that crack fixed. I have the feeling that there is more stash somewhere, my mother's things, the stuff my sister eventually passed on. Vague memories of hiding it somewhere really safe a couple of years ago after  some houses in the neighbourhood were burgled. And this vivid memory of me taking off the big gorgeous silver ring before washing my hands, the one R bought for me from the Iranian silversmith, and then rushing to the car. I can still see it sitting there beside the soap dispenser. Somewhere. In Europe.

When we renovated Mona's bedroom before she came home from the hospital, we found most of her jewellery sewn into the curtain hems. She was already too ill to explain but I am sure she thought it was a safe hiding place.

Oh that whole sorry affair of distributing her jewellery according to her will. And against the combined wills of her daughters. That was a long time ago. 

And also a long time ago S carried it all in her small backpack to France and back, secretely. Well, almost back. Because on the way home, after she had brought it up and down the mountains, when we had driven north for a while she started wailing that she left the backpack behind. In the motorway restaurant on a Sunday in July, in the south of France, where a million people were queuing and eating and watching the Tour de France final stretch in Paris on TV.

Plus the day some years earlier when we were messing and splashing in the high waves just before sunset and in the corner of my eye I caught this glimmering arc as the first two rings R ever got me slipped off my finger and sank into the soft water of the Indian Ocean.

Many years later I would sit at a table in a small cafe in Turkey while Birsel explained all about cyanide based gold mining.