I find it amazing that in this modern world almost everyone has connections with someone living abroad.
Yesterday I had three phone calls all from female friends.
The first was a lady who I used to work with, now retired but with whom I occasionally still meet to go to the theatre. We were making plans to go see a new show called “Bad girls, the musical” based on the popular TV series of the same name, the reviews are very good I understand...but I digress...
Her connection with abroad is her brother who moved to San Francisco nearly thirty years ago. She visits him frequently and only last week she had met up with him and his family ‘though not in America but on a Mediterranean cruise.

The second phone call was from a lady who gives me a weekly lift to my U3A Spanish language class (did I ever mention that I am the baby of the group) she was phoning to say that she wouldn’t be picking me up this week as she wouldn’t be attending due to the fact that her brother and his wife were visiting them from their chateau in France. They sold their UK home about six months ago to move to France permanently so now my friend needs to brush up on her French speaking skills in order to enrich the inevitable future holidays she'll be taking in France.

Oddly enough the third phone call was from another lapsed member of the Spanish group, a lady who along with her husband has been staying at her daughter’s residence near Barcelona for the last three months.
Her daughter married a Catalan about eight years ago and has just given birth to twin girls to compliment the two toddler boys she already has. Grandma and grandpa have been staying there to give mum some much needed support as dad is very busy working and being involved in local politics. The twins are six weeks old now so my friends have returned home.
Very conveniently for me I might add as I now have a replacement offer of a lift to the class (I don’t drive) this week.

Then there are the friends of my daughter who I met at the exhibition last week, one student spent last year on a placement living and working in Florence and a second friend has been back packing around Australia.

When I was young, in the days before package holidays and low cost flights were invented, the most distant connection I had was my maternal aunts and uncles who lived near Glasgow, my mother met my father during the war and moved down from Scotland to Yorkshire when they married.
When I was about ten years old I used to have a pen friend from Finland,how I looked forward to the infrequent postcards and letters I received from her; she sent me a postcard of a snowy forest scene which I still have tucked away somewhere.
It's a far cry from the instant communications via the internet that one can have with persons from all over the world today! "Hiya all"
Around the same time a young German boy called Heinz visited our school for a couple of weeks,it’s amazing that I still remember his name but all the girls in my class made a fuss of him what with his accent, blond hair and Germanic good looks and also I was in awe of foreigners back then.

Times have certainly changed.