I do apologise. There will be no blog this week.
I’ve been away for the weekend, you see, celebrating a special birthday of a special friend, rekindling too-long neglected acquaintances and basking in the warmth of friendship and love;
overcoming a deep-seated hatred of flying and damn well getting on the plane, sweaty palms and all, and distracting myself with a really good book all the way to Fiumicino;
feeling that moment of satisfaction on seeing the first umbrella pine and knowing that we were in Italy; but at the same time noticing that the taxi driver was driving THIS close to the car in front while perching his phone on his knee so he could follow the satnav, and despite this, nearly not being able to find the place because all we had was the name of a house and a road that seemed to run the length of Lazio;
exclaiming at the sheer size of the rental property, an old monastery with, so I’m told, a small part of original Roman floor in one of the bedrooms, where Horace (HORACE — jiminy cricket even I’ve heard of him and I was rubbish at Latin and mostly slept through it) used to hang out, and running down the long flagstoned corridor in stockinged feet but not quite daring to do skidsies because it was a bit uneven and I didn’t want to trip and break my nose and ruin the whole weekend for everyone;
eating and drinking too much at the Long Kitchen Table of Bonhommy, and doing the same again the next night in the Huge Dining Room of Exuberant Merrymaking, even though we swore we’d never eat or drink again after the first night;
playing cards and being absolutely delighted, yes DELIGHTED I SAY, when our hostess, the birthday girl, for love of whom eight of us had assembled from various parts of Europe, won not once, not twice, but THREE times in a row;
finding a chair and curling up with a cup of tea and some biscuits and allowing myself an hour of just reading an excellent book without any distractions at all and, as always, being amazed at how much I can read in an hour if there aren’t any distractions (although the crappy internet signal at the house might also have had something to do with this);
being quite relieved actually that I’ve been away so I haven’t been in close touch with the cricket;
walking up to Tivoli on the road and being pleasantly surprised at the courtesy of Italian drivers, but unpleasantly surprised by the two large dogs who burst out onto the road in front of us and very nearly end up squished to a pulp by a Fiat Punto;
seeing a face so archetypally Roman that if it hadn’t been for the cellulare pressed to her ear I might have imagined myself transported back two millennia, and wondering what the Romans would think if they could see the state of the world now, and realising they’d probably be amazed and dismayed that they weren’t still in charge;
walking round the gardens at the Villa d’Este and being disappointed that neither the Fountain of the Swans nor the Fountain of the Owl had anything, as far as we could see, to do with their eponymous birds;
coming back after a walk and looking out of the window and seeing a black redstart in the tree just ten yards away, and wondering that it took me fifty-two years to see my first and now I’ve seen two in as many months;
spending time with intelligent and engaging young people and thinking that perhaps there is hope for the future of the world after all;
looking out from our bedroom across the valley to the waterfall and not really wanting to stop looking at it, but having to, and then dragging ourselves unwilling from the assembled company, wanting to stay just one more night, but knowing that school and work and feeding the cat and bins are unpleasant realities we can’t avoid for ever, and actually maybe the extra night would have made it that little bit less perfect;
getting to the station way too early just in case and standing on the platform and silently cheering just a little when the train, Mussolini’s influence a long-distant memory, was just late enough to be properly late but not late enough to jeopardise our check-in at the airport;
sitting on the train looking at the excellent book but not really reading it because tiredness and hangover and general reverie, and glancing up out of the window and catching sight of a swoop of movement just above the horizon and realising that it was about five thousand starlings going down for the roost and then seeing that five thousand was nothing because moving above the train and off to the right were starlings too numerous to count, wave after wave of them, locust-like in number, billowing and eddying across the crepuscular sky and shape-shifting towards their tryst, and let’s say there were 103,698 of them because that’s the kind of number it felt like, and they were the perfect way to end a perfect weekend;
and what with one thing and another not finding time to sit down and think about something to write about.
So as I say, I do apologise. There will be no blog this week.
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