Whoa, I survived a week of tooth ache and a dentist visit and I still have all of my miserably few teeth! Glory days. 

While I sat in the waiting room I actually managed to calm down a visibly shaking woman. A lot of very fake bravura on my part met sheer desperation on hers. I felt almost strong and courageous after that and sat on my hands for the most time after she left. Just in case she came running back to me.

I am watching and re-watching Wolf Hall and not only because I try to follow the plot - I mean I can't, all these dukes and counts and earls and who must get married to whom and what has the church got to say about it. I am waiting for the next beheading, I think there is another one coming. I haven't read the books anyway. Historical novels are not my thing, but I have read and loved all the other books by Hilary Mantel (esp. her biography).

No, I am really watching Mark Rylance playing Thomas Cromwell, because he looks and talks a lot like a friend I had a long time ago. The kind of friend who knows what you need before you realise it yourself, who smuggles you into the staff canteen at the children's hospital after midnight because you have not eaten for the last 24 hrs since your baby was admitted with meningitis, who turns up unasked in a miraculously borrowed car during a downpour ready to drop you at the station in time - and without so much as a drop on you and so on. That was then. 

But he is also quite a bit like Thomas Cromwell, scheming, getting his way, always his way regardless. And at times my trust meant nothing.

We spoke on the phone a few years ago, after a friend had died, we spoke for a good long while and it felt almost right again. I know he has been asking about me, he knows I have been asking about him. He is getting on and one day someone will call with the news and I will board that plane back to Ireland. Maybe.

Anyway, Wolf Hall is splendid.