Ladies who Lunch (on celery sticks and slimming aids, apparently.)

Earlier this week I went to a luncheon with a LOVELY group of  young Chilean ladies, and I came home rather thoughtful. Gringo men in Chile, the ladies told me - earnestly, and with emphatic hands on my knee - don't stand a chance.  It doesn't matter if the men are married or single; there are always one or more Chilean women (slender, sinuous and raven-haired all) watching and waiting from the shadows.  Twenty-four hours a day.   Ready to pounce.

Mr Tabubil wants to know who his two are, and why he hasn't met them yet.  He peers penetratingly into the corners of every room he goes through, with a vaguely eager expression on his face.

He has suggested that I might go back to the ladies who lunch and sue for breach of promise.

The deeply altruistic follow-up to my tea-and-cookies warning was a darling lady named Claudia who called me to clarify that she takes it upon herself to warn all the Gringa ladies that she thinks might be in danger, or to put it more precisely, are putting on weight.  Because Chilean ladies NEVER put on the pounds as they get older and THEY keep their men.  (Older!  I'm barely thirty!)

I am assuming that Claudia is telling me all this out of friendly interest, as a sort of inconsequential in-passing thing, and NOT because she thinks I need a well-timed warning to hit the Atkins diet.

Possibly she is jealous my brownies.  It was a pot-luck luncheon and my baking excelled itself.  Nothing that I baked came out of an imported Duncan Hines box.