29 August 167

Mrs. Ava Helen Pauling

794 Hot Springs Road

Santa Barbara, California

93103 USA

Dear Mamma,

Thank you for your letter. I look forward to seeing you on the 15th October and visiting you in Montpelier. I think I can arrange the latter.

I have been feeling pretty blue. Julia is anxious for me to move out and I did so the 17th into a flat of a colleague who is away. On the 10th September I start sharing a flat with a painter. It is not ideal but I guess it will work more or less all right.

I do not know whether it is worth it to go all the way to California for Christmas. I would like to visit again and would like to be with you all for a while but it is an awful lot of money. That amount of money would make a big difference to the sort of flat I lived in and I am not sure it is sensible to have this sort of shooting stars in one's life. It would be fun though. Perhaps I can arrange a lecture tour sometime in the next few years. In a year or two I will have a good story I think on nervous transmission. I do not feel much like a lot of travel at the moment. Too much last year and I am too blue.

I spent six days in Denmark, in a little village called Skagen at the uppermost tip of Jutland. Do you remember putting me on a ship in Copenhagen in 1953? I went to the same place and saw the same people. I do not much like Nina's two little boys though; too spoiled. I do not know whether you knew her husband was killed three years ago in a motor car. They were living in Morocco. She has had quite a rough time. She has moved back to Denmark and has a job teaching in a kindergarten.

Much love,

Peter