I read that you use a different part of your brain when you learn a second (or third?) language later in life. I wish I could access that part. I know it's there. I just don't do enough homework. I want to learn Icelandic but I have other priorities, chief among them to "finish" my book. So I go to my Icelandic class and flounder and flail - and fail.

I did my homework yesterday, but I didn't learn much. We had been given a recent copy of an Icelandic newspaper and told to pick an item and report on it. We had to translate it, of course, but we could report in English. I made pönnukökur - pancakes - not that I haven't made pancakes before, but Icelandic pancakes are different: thin, like crèpes, and rolled or folded around brown sugar or preserves, eaten at kaffitíma (coffee time), not breakfast. I followed the recipe and had to learn the words for teaspoon, tablespoon, etc., and also to follow metric measurements for the flour and butter, etc. I am still an alien on this planet, have been ever since metric measurements were introduced in Canada. Egg, I'm happy to say, is egg. So I took pönnukökur to class. Frábært! (Great!) But I still can't speak or understand Icelandic and I can't speak or understand metric, either. There must be something I can do. I keep trying every day.

It worked. I showered and shampooed in the changing room, as if I had gone swimming. So the day has been working better. Why do we have to keep learning the same lesson over and over again? You'd think by my age I'd know enough to behave myself.

St. Augustine said "We do not leave our sins; our sins leave us." I guess. So when you finally resist temptation, it's not because you have developed the strength to resist, it's because the temptation doesn't tempt you any more.

I am so grateful for things hat don't tempt me, as well as for things that have ceased to tempt me. I have never been tempted by cheesecake so it's very easy to resist. I haven't had pie for years; it seems to have fallen off my goodies list. (Actually, a neighbour gave me a piece of pumpkin pie a few weeks ago and I ate it because I don't like to throw things out, but I wasn't thrilled, didn't want to go out and buy a pie.) The trick with resisting the temptation of most things is to say NO once in the store. Once a goody is in the house it starts calling your name.

You notice these temptations are all edible ones. I guess behavioural ones are harder to resist, and more insidious, like porn, I suppose. Well, for me, porn is even less alluring than cheesecake. Come to that, are women generally tempted by porn? Soft porn, I guess - the love scenes that go on for three or four pages, quite explicitly, in Harlequin Romances and their ilk. I actually went through a phase of gulping them, a few years after my husband died. I picked up an HR in a place I was staying at, read it quickly, and cried. My life wasn't like that, nor likely to be, ever. For about a year I read three or four HRs a week, finding some authors I enjoyed - the rare ones with a sense of humour - and analyzed romance fiction. It's harder to write than you'd think.

How did I get to this? Oh, temptation. Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist anything except temptation". Me too.