(3 cousins – Sophie, Brian & Anna)

Over the past week or so we’ve had a house guest. My cousin Anna from Torino, having recently been sent on an English course by her work decided to come to London to hone her newfound language skills. The thing is, prior to her arrival Anna and I had never met. Sure, we’d spoke on the phone and exhanged a few emails and SMS messages -but her arrival at Gatwick was going to be the first time we’d meet in the flesh. To complicate things further, I had no idea what she looked like. So I wasn’t completely sure who I’d be looking out for at the arrivals gate. Luckily, Anna came prepared. She’d seen photos of me in my photo gallery. And if worse came to worse* Anna had made this sign to hold up in case she couldn’t recognise me in person. Clever girl.

* (as a quick aside, I’ve never actually had to write the expression “worse comes to worse” before and wasn’t sure if it was actually “worst comes to worst” or a combination of the two. Citing a two year old “googlefight” as a reference is unlikely to appeal the more critical among you, but hey – this was the first thing I could find, and it’s the Saturday of a long weekend so I really can’t be bothered digging any deeper. So there, that’s settled… well sort of.)

Anyway, the above concerns were rendered a bit irrelevant as Anna recognised me instantly, and we were off and flying from there. Anna was a complete riot, and we spent a very enjoyable week together. It also gave us a chance to spend a bit more time with our cousin Sophie who lives all of 10mins walk away but due to mutual slackness we only catch up periodically. Between the three cousins we cooked up a few more than decent storms. Sophie made a thai green chicken curry. Anna made porcini mushroom risotto (in a wok!! see photo) and linguini marinara**. I chipped in with this Columbian chicken dish which has become a bit of a favorite of mine over here, but more about that in another post.

**(as another brief aside, I was interested to learn that when we Australians refer to pasta marinara as being full of mixed seafood in a tomato/garlic sauce, strictly speaking we’ve got it wrong. For Italians (and I’ve since discovered Americans) marinara sauce is essentially a plain tomato sauce (cooked, not Heinz-slop-on-to-a-pie style). Italians refer to the fishy variant as “frutte di mare” = “fruits of the sea”. So there you go)

Sophie took Anna out for a fun day at the Borough Market – which are broadly the London equivalent of the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. Olivia and I spent a lovely day out at Hampton Court Palace. Going out to Hampton Court Palace was a bit of a treat for all of us. For Olivia and I it was great as we’d not been there before and found it to be a beatutiful and well organised attraction. Not to mention the fact that if we had to do another round of Big Ben, Tower of London and Buckingham Palace our heads were going to explode. For Anna it was fun as it’s somewhere a little different to the usual London tourist attractions one tends to see.
Big thumbs up for HCP. Can’t wait to go back there in spring to wander through the 60 odd acres of gardens there and really make a day of it. 3 hours there was nowhere near enough.

Anna and I hatched the idea of organising a weekend gathering of all our cousins some time next year. The cousins of the Barison family (on my mum’s side) live in Australia, London and mostly spread across Italy, so we figured that Florence would be a great place to have it. All the Barison cousins have never been in the one place before, so it could potentially be a riotous (or disastrous) weekend. Actually pulling this off will be quite a feat, but if nothing else we love the idea. I’ll keep you posted.

It was a pleasure having Anna over, if not a little surreal. Meeting for the first time with me at 31 years old and Anna at 42 left me feeling as though we’d known each other all along. Am really looking forward to our next (and first) visit to Turin…