I travel alone most of the time, but when I travel with someone, it's with my son, Matt. We fly to Boston twice a year to visit my daughter and her family in Quincy (pron. Kwinzee). He is very nice to travel with, very patient and full of good humour. Well, you know what an obstacle course travel is these days. Getting there is not half the fun, it's no fun at all. So while we are taking off our shoes and emptying our pockets and losing our boarding passes and (me) pulling out my laptop and my iPadMini, one or the other of us will say, "Are we having fun yet?" Nope.

But Matt is fun to be with, and when we are finally settled in our seats, then we start having fun. It's important to know when and to learn the difference between no fun and fun.

Every Christmas I have to learn it again. If I'm sounding a bit premature, it's because 67 years ago this weekend (November 25), Bill Wylie proposed to me. Not like in the movies on bended knee. He said something like, "I give up. We have to get married." Not shotgun have-to, just have to because we thought we couldn't Iive without each other. Later,of course, 23 years later, he put me to the test. I have lived without him.

It's not as much fun.

As I have told you before, if you were paying attention, I have a number of esoteric and/or bizarre dictionaries that I love to browse. If you have others that I haven't heard of, please let me know.

Here's my list (after re-charging):

Landmarks, by Robert Macfarlane. I told you about this one some time in the fall. It's a field guide to the British landscape but the part of it that I love best, parts, I should say, are the Glossaries, with the magical (esoteric0 local language. Eleven in all, but the tenth one is blank, for "future place-words and the reader's own terms."

I have a few in there; ice-worms (Bill's expression); darkness melts (a child's explanation of morning light); shit-brindle (I don't like brown); scunge (my father's expression); noodle ( I think mine); jolly (my father's again, his version of a tschotschke).

They Have a Word For It: A Light-Hearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases by (that is, gathered together by) Howard Rheingold. One of my favourites is lagniappe. You can look it up.

The Book of Jargon: An Essential Guide to the Inside Languages of Today, by (com[iled by)Don Ethan Miller. There's all kinds of different categories, but I couldn't find zamboni.

Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual Obscure, and Preposterous Words, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne. My favourite. She doesn't have huddle, though, or hirple. [Note: my stupid auto-check keeps trying to put an h on that first word instead of a g. I hate it when something corrects me incorrectly.] She does have sloom (to doze, to become weak, to decay, dog move sluggishly, to drift. sloomy, adj. And I like thirl: to pierce or perforate, to make vibrate, to enslave . adj: gaunt, thin, shrivelled.

Shakespeare's Bawdy, by Eric Partridge.Everyoe should re-read this before they go to Stratford.

More to come - not sure when.....