Senetti

How many guests arrive for lunch bearing most of the ingredients to make a salad then ask the host whether they have any chicken stock and turmeric?
And how many hosts then say, 'yes'?

So it was. S needed the chicken stock (home-made, in my freezer) to boil the chick peas he'd brought for the Kurdish salad he then made. Meanwhile his and my friend Fatma, also Kurdish but from a different part of beleaguered, divided Kurdistan, so speaking a different dialect, brought these flowers for my garden. I'd never heard of them but love their vibrancy.

It was great to see them both, and inevitably our conversation drifted into languages, dialects, pronunciation, the abomination that is English (they both speak it very well and it is usually their mutual language) phrasal verbs, skinny and fat 'r's, 'l's, 'w's and 'y's (new to me), then colonialism and arming both sides of a conflict (not new to me).