[Yes, I know, another retrospective post. I’ll catch up eventually – maybe!]
All I can say is that it wasn’t me. Despite the name, it was Francine who coined it. Her getting to the name stemmed from a couple of different things.
First, during a pre-Christmas girlie trip to Oxford, Francine bought me a splendid metal dragonfly to go with my obsession. This really is a quite magnificent creature with a wingspan of 45cms/18ins. Let’s call it Aeshna metallica. I particularly like the use of twisted wire mesh to resemble the wing veins – very clever. It’s clearly designed to be screwed onto a wall, given the holes in its two front legs.
Then Francine remembered that one of our friends lived in a house in Dorset called Dragonfly Cottage. That led to Francine wondering what the Spanish for dragonfly might be so we looked it up: it’s libélule. It proved a little tricky for us to say correctly – that accent on the first “e” is a stress mark and stressing that particular syllable proved less than natural for us. No matter, we’ll keep playing the sound of the word to ourselves and get used to it in the fullness of time. Anyway, with a magnificent libélule to screw to the wall, our intended Spanish property naturally became Casa Libélule. I’m not really given to naming houses, although I do tend to name many other inanimate objects, like Billy, our caravan, but I’ll make an exception this time.
Acting on information received, Francine strengthened our Casa Libélule theme by presenting me at Christmas with a wine decanter decorated with a subtle dragonfly design, too. Well, we’ll definitely be needing a wine decanter to go with our 5.75€ for 5 litres flagons of top quality Jalón valley rosado, won’t we? We very briefly considered the “matching” glasses but, unlike the decanter, they are made of very thick glass, for some reason. Shame, really.
Coincidentally, my dragonfly obsession led to our American friends giving us a magnificent set of drink coasters decorated with dragonfly motifs. These are very clever absorbent coasters that wet bottomed glasses do not stick to limpet-like when you pick them up to take a drink. They will be on a southerly migration to Spain as soon as possible.
We’ve also had for some time, another gift, a handy-dandy napkin holder with a dragonfly on it which will also be on a southerly migration course, together with a not-so-handy-dandy nightlight/tea light holder. Basically, I regard tea lights as utterly useless. Furthermore, when did nightlights suddenly become tea lights and why? Answers welcomed in the comments form.
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