Welcome to the round up of posts you might have missed this week on Smorgasbord.

I hope your week has gone well. January went very quickly and cannot believe we are in February already.

The three of us with my mother in 2000 on their first visit to our home in Madrid.

It is a busy month in our family, as we three sisters all have our birthdays. My brother slipped into March and was a bit of a surprise as my mother was 40. She was always a good sailor but on our trip home from two years Sri Lanka, which was extended because of the Suez Canal crisis, she felt unwell. She went to the doctor on arriving home to the village where we had our home and he diagosed dispepsia!  A month later she rang him and said dispepsia just kicked me.

I was four at the…