It's been a long time since I missed birthday week in Queenstown - so many of my favourite people have celebrations this week that I usually end it totally exhausted.
If you see Gayle Pettit, Philly Archibald, Deanie Johnstone or Fleur Caulton, do tell them how young and pretty they are looking.
It was also my birthday this week.
The last day of being 50 ended on a total high after meeting Kathryn Wills in London and having her say we looked like twins.
I took it to mean that we ACTUALLY looked like twins rather than just had the same clothes on; identical except for style, quality and size (she's miles bigger on the first two and miles smaller on the latter) so really not twins at all, but it felt great having glamorous Kathryn say it anyway.
The real day was a total downer in comparison, as the round-vowelled nephew and I bumped into one of his school friends. His mother was with him and said "Oh, you must be Lisa's mother" - Lisa being my nearly 50-year-old sister. I bit back the tears and managed not to make rude comments about her eyesight and intelligence.
My sister was delighted and mentioned it way more than was interesting.
Apart from the stupidity of SOME Londoners, London was fabulous.
At first my only cultural outing was to see the Smurfs movie with the RVN, which he enjoyed and I watched.
It got better after that, as an old friend said she was driving to London to see me and did I want to go and see the BP Portrait Awards exhibition?
What a treat.
My friend is a professional portrait artist and it was fantastic seeing 50 works from all over the world with her commentary on what makes a portrait tick.
Have a look on the National Portrait Gallery website - www.npg.org.uk - some are very creepy.
Everyone had been telling me to go and see Kristin Scott Thomas in Harold Pinter's Betrayal.
As ever, I hadn't got round to booking tickets and it was no surprise that it was a sell-out show if you read the reviews.
Anyway, I thought it was worth seeing if there were any last-minute tickets on the last day.
I managed to get the worst seat in the house - after half an hour, I realised there was a whole double bed on the stage that I hadn't been able to see.
Given that it was a play about infidelity, I did wonder if the bed's presence meant I might have missed some key parts of the story, but it seems the bed was mainly there for decoration.
Kristin Scott Thomas is so tiny - she has such a huge presence in every movie I have seen her in that I was expecting someone much bigger.
And she's terrific on stage as well. It was well worth putting my neck out, literally, to see the show.
My darling was a bit disappointed to see how much more wife he was getting when I got back from London after a week of eating and drinking far too well.
England really has changed since I lived there - the food is terrific and so many people bike and walk everywhere now.
It is all so much prettier and greener somehow.
And our strong dollar (or is it England's weak pound) makes everything a lot sunnier and more exciting.
I still have a big pile of books I want to read and promised myself I wouldn't get any new ones in London, but I did find Sarah Quigley's The Conductor by my bed.
My mother had recommended it to me, and while she is the source of an enormous amount of advice I neither want nor follow, this time she did really well.
The author is a New Zealander and a very clever one if her doctorate from Oxford is anything to go by.
I have a deep loathing of books that come with free gifts - I would never let my children have them and wouldn't let them have any toys that were advertised on TV for the same reason - if a book or toy needs free gifts and TV ads to sell it, they obviously aren't anticipating any word-of-mouth recommendations.
The Conductor comes with a CD of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, but as it really does add to the enjoyment of the story, I am prepared not to call it a promotional gift but an integral part of the book.
Listening to the symphony while you read about the people and the problems they suffered while this was written makes it so much more meaningful.
It's important to remember when you are reading the story that the book is about the conductor, not the composer, and to pay attention to the bits about Karl Eliasberg, the sad, shabby and less shining star of the story.
Nothing much goes right for him and his ghastly mother is so ghastly that she is really fun to read about.
This is a historical novel set during the siege of Leningrad.
Because this was such an exciting and horrible time in history, many books have been set in this period, but few have been as well written.
The end of our Turkish sojourn is in sight - I hope the snow has gone by the time we return.
I got a beautiful message from a Turkish friend last week for everyone in Queenstown after the big snowstorm had made the news here.
"I wish good luck to everyone who is affecting from this God of act."
Let's hope there are no more Gods of act this year.
