Via L. Zambeletti 4

Murray has run whatever high-tech wizardry it was to determine what was the matter with the computer (remember, it claimed it had a virus), and found nothing. This is good news, because we were dreading some Armageddon-like destruction of precious files. It also means that another step has been taken on the path towards electronic sentience, as we now have proof that computers can suffer from psychosomatic illnesses.

Well, either that, or it's learned to malinger, which is even stronger proof for sentience.

11^th Jan 1999

As seems to happen so often, little things have happened over the past few days that made me think, 'I must write that to people', and now that I'm actually at the keyboard they've all floated off into the wild grey yonder. I'll see if I can lure them back by pretending not to care.

The news of the Virgin train that ran out of diesel somewhere near Birmingham actually made it to the local news (it was used to back up an argument against privatization, and can you blame them?). When we told some friends, their first reaction was 'Diesel?' They could not believe that there are sections of the railways in the UK that haven't been electrified. I suppose that the disadvantage of being the first in the world to invent or use anything is that you often end by upgrading last. There followed a long discussion and comparison of different European rail services, the details of which I'll spare you, but the general conclusion was that all local services are awful and a lot of the long-distance fast services are excellent. Any morals to be found in there, by anyone?

Such hypothetical morals could surface more easily if one remembers that in the days between Christmas and New Year, when the weather was cold, clear (with fog early and late) and still, air pollution levels in Milan broke the EU safety limits several times (I forget how many, shame, shame). These EU limits are supposed to be lowered next year, which means that air quality here will go over the alarm level even more frequently. And what are our Fearless Leader's plans for such an event? Uhm, er, well, hope for a strong north wind. Which, when you think about it, doesn't solve the problem, just blows it somewhere else. Or rain, that's good! Yes, it washes all the nasty chemicals out of the air and into the surface of buildings, the soil, the water table...

Close the city centre to traffic? No, no, that would never do, the traders would lose business (actually, turnover from shopping in pedestrian-only streets in Milan has gone up). Ban cars on days when the pollution levels get too high? (it doesn't solve the long-term problem, but it does reduce emissions in the short term, and it might even make people realise that public transport works pretty well, considering) Well, we'll ban all cars without catalytic converters (a minority). Create cycle lanes? Heaven forbid! Where would all our nice voters' nice Mercedes go? (This despite the fact that there was a very strong tradition in Milan of going to work and to school on bikes - a tradition that still exists in more civilized cities in the Pianura Padana, which is, itself, eminently cycle-friendly territory, being mostly flat, and with only a couple of months of really wet weather a year.) Persuade people that there's nowhere to put their cars by actually fining those who park so creatively (on pavements, on pedestrian crossings, on disabled ramps, you name it) ? Good grief, only near the year end, when we need the money from fines in order to get the city budget out of the red.

You can tell I'm a born-again pedestrian, can't you?

The following won't mean anything to most of you, but Fabrizio De Andre' died last night, which is a sad thing because he wrote some damn fine songs. Let's say he was the Italian equivalent of a cross between Dylan and Cohen, but he could actually sing, as well. He was caustic, anarchic, deeply critical and savagely amusing. Besides, some of his songs have marked specific summers of my youth, and while you don't need the reminiscences, you all have equivalently significant marker-posts of life, and when one of the creators of the marker-posts goes, a bit of the ground around the post goes with him.

After which, I can only really tell you about the weather. Just like on the news, you see. And now, the weather:

After the driest November this century (and, let's face it, there isn' t a lot of time left for breaking records), January has decided to make up for the lack of precipitation by throwing it all down at once. It's rain on the plain (not in Spain, though. Or perhaps in Spain as well. Pete would know), and snow on the mountains over 500 metres (which technically makes them hills, actually. Italian geographers insist that mountains start at 900 metres, don't ask me why) in the north, while in the centre it's snow over 1000 metres. So if your skiing holiday is about to start, you picked the right time. If it's just over, you didn't, as the only snow in the resorts over the holiday period was the stuff they sprayed on the pistes with their snow-cannon machines.

Anyway, it's been pretty cold and very wet for the past few days, which has washed all the pollution gases down into the sewers, where no doubt they will contribute to the evolution of a new mutant life form which will stalk the streets one of these days. It's also kept all but the most determined graffiti sprayers off the streets, which is more than our Fearless Leader's latest initiative was going to do. Albertini, that's the name of the mayor, but he is ably aided and abetted by Fearless Lieutenants such as De Corato, the vice-mayor (his name sounds exactly like 'decorato', which is, as you may easily guess, Italian for 'decorated' or 'adorned' - tempting fate or what?), and other bright sparks. Where was I? Ah yes. Albertini has decided to try the 'zero tolerance' approach to graffiti, by instituting a reward for anyone who reports graffiti writers. Naturally, all the graffiti writers (I refuse to call 99% of them artists) instantly decided that this was a great challenge, and phoned in to local radio stations saying that they would go out and write even more stuff on walls, just to show him what they think of the idea. Somebody took the idea to extremes by suggesting that if enough kids got together they could take turns to report each other and collect enough rewards to buy themselves a whole building they could then legally spray to their heart's content... But you can guess that this person was not on the Fearless Council.

While I agree that most of the stuff I see on the local walls is total rubbish - in fact, all of the stuff I see sprayed on the local walls is total rubbish, sloppy tags, I don't really think that the solution to a lot of kids who clearly feel that the only way to belong in the city is to mark it (rather like animals marking territory) is to tell them that they are being bad. That's why they do it in the first place, surely. If it wasn't a Bad Thing to do, it wouldn't be worth doing. But it was a bit sad hearing those kids on the radio talking about themselves as 'Writers', in English, when they couldn't even pronounce the word...

I'm sure there was more, but this will do for now.

13^th January 1999

Yesterday, in the market, I went further along the road than usual because my mother had asked me to look for something for her (she's still stuck at home with the 'flu). So I was walking rather slowly past some stalls I don't normally go to, and I heard one stallholder say to another, 'Well, what can you do? Rob a bank, I suppose,' which amused me. They must have noticed, because one of them turned to me and said, 'Would you like to join us, madam?' I laughed and said it sounded like a good idea, and the other one helpfully suggested, 'You could go home, leave the shopping, then come back and pick a bank you like, we'll be a team.' Which I thought was very nice of him.

The fact that yesterday afternoon, having spent all my money in the market, I went to get some cash from the cash machine and found it off line (I could see a man inside the bank doing things to it) made the idea of a bank raid rather tempting.

Meanwhile, more seriously, the city is in mourning today because of a series of recent murders of shopkeepers and traders. The funeral of the latest murder victim, a newspaper kiosk owner, are taking place now, and a large number of shops have closed as a sign of solidarity. Various political parties have seen this sudden rise in 'micro-criminality' (I don't think they mean that murder is a micro-crime, I think they mean that the recent events are the kind of crime that isn't linked to large crime organizations) as an excellent excuse to organise demonstrations against immigrants. Quite forgetting that at least one of the murders is known to have been committed by Italian gunmen. Not that it seems to occur to anyone that if the immigrants had more of a chance to find legal jobs, fewer of them would end up being drawn into criminal activities...

The President of the Chamber of Deputies (i.e. Prime Minister) and the Minister of the Interior (Home Office) came to Milan yesterday for a very high-profile meeting in which he proposed the stunning suggestion of actually having one emergency phone number instead of three, and one emergency centre co-ordinating intervention by police, Carabinieri (they're really part of the Army, but are the closest thing to a national police force) and Guardia di Finanza (sort of customs officers). Wow. What is more, in the near future, the three forces are actually going to - gasp! - share information!

After which revelations one is really not surprised that organised crime has had such an easy time of it in the past.

And, on a less serious note, it has recently come to the attention of some kind of regulating body whose acronym is TAR, but I'm afraid I don't know exactly what that stands for, other than T for Tribunal, that drinks cans with stay-on ring-pulls are unhygienic. Shocking, shocking, you could catch all sorts of nasties because the ring-pull dips into the drink when you open the can, therefore the system may have to be changed. I was rather wondering why nobody has noticed the hordes of fizzy-drinking teenagers falling dead in the streets until now... Or, in fact, whether the rims of the cans, against which one places one's mouth when drinking are inherently cleaner and more hygienic than the ring-pulls.

And the ecological news: the temperature of the water at the bottom of the Italian lakes (below 150 metres deep) has gone up from an average of 5.8 degrees in 1963 to 6.8 degrees now. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you think of the mass of water involved, it is. What worries people is that the change in temperature might have some serious effects on the lake's hydrodinamics, particularly the circulation of water. There is a fear that an alteration of the water density at the bottom would leave the lower layers of water still, and therefore isolated, thus decreasing the depth of the living lake - as has occurred in Lake Lugano, in Switzerland, for example. The lake is over 200 metres deep, but only the top 100 metres or so still support life.

15^th January 1999

First of all, apologies to those of you we didn't manage to see or talk to while we were in the UK. Murray was at work, as were most of you, during the daytime, so that limited our options quite a lot. We were also very tired all the time, which may have been due to a combination of long hours of driving in not exactly relaxing weather conditions, the cold, and normal life. You know, minor things like sleep requirements.

Anyway, I discovered the joys of trying to get from A to B, or more precisely, from Bracknell to Basingstoke, by public transport, which confirmed all my theories about the deliberate attempt to keep them separate, in case of a sudden roundabout overload, which might cause them to implode. It would be easier to build a wall, you know. The Bracknell Wall, that has a certain ring to it...

I suppose that after a while living in a fairly central area of a fairly well-organised city, you forget that in distant backwaters the buses only go by on alternate Wednesdays when there's an R in the month, but it was terribly frustrating, because it interfered with things I had planned to do, like actually talk to the estate agents who are managing our house about sorting out some repairs before the place collapses and our tenants sue us... Not quite that bad, but it may get to that point if I can't get those damn people to actually pay attention, instead of saying they'll "have to speak to Management".

We did manage to see some people (you know who you are), to go and see Zorro (jolly good fun) and Shakespeare in Love (hugely good fun), eat garlic-free take-aways and continue the adventures of the Countess and her retinue (they'd kill me for this, if they weren't gentlemen...) in the Dreamlands scenario. We also got the twins a reasonable number of Star Wars scenarios for their game, and I got to build various Duplo structures for my nephew to demolish.

So, before we knew where we were, it was Monday (that's last Monday), and we had to go to Paris. Oh what a shame, I thought, the perfect opportunity to go and see the Unicorn tapestries in the Cluny museum while Murray does more useful Honeywell things. Alas, I had reckoned without the fact that we were staying in a different hotel from the one last summer. It was in one of those terribly small villages with one bus an hour, if you're lucky. And you don't know when in the hour until you find the bus stop, of course. When I found the bus stop, I found out the bus had gone by ten minutes earlier. And it was snowing.

The other problem was that, after perusing the map at the bus stop (terribly civilised habit, this putting maps of all the bus routes on the bus stops, it means you can start working out which bus you want and where it's going to go), it seemed to me that the only bus that went through there went to another village, but not anywhere near a train station. This would have meant finding another bus from there, in order to catch a train to Paris, and at that point, having no idea how long a wait I would have at each stage but assuming, on past experience, that it would average about twenty minutes, I worked out that by the time I arrived in Paris I would have to turn around and come back. That, combined with the thought of fifty minutes' wait at a bus stop to begin with, did it. I turned around and went back to the hotel, where at least it was warm.

Meanwhile, all the snow that's been fluttering around Europe had been doing one of the things that snow does so well, that is, falling in large amounts on the Alps. Unfortunately, the snowfalls had been alternating with warmish winds and bright sunshine, and as a result, there was a serious avalanche near Chamonix, as you may have seen on the news. One of the side-effects of the avalanche was to close the road to the tunnel, so we were delayed one day as we waited to hear whether it was going to be possible to cross into Italy.

We drove south last Thursday, still unsure whether we'd find the roads open. We managed to escape the Francilienne (that's the motorway that encircles Paris to the south-west) despite the snow and the traffic, and our hopes were raised when we reached Burgundy and, between Dijon and Beaune, the sun came out and the snow disappeared. That's obviously why the vines like the area.

Further south, there was more snow, the whole of Haute Savoie looked as if it had decided to take a nap until spring under a very fluffy white quilt, and we started being concerned about the road to the Mont Blanc tunnel again. Fortunately, the snowploughs had been through that morning, the road had been cleared and thoroughly salted, and we made it safely to Italy. Where, although there was snow on the ground in Courmayeur, the roads were clear, the sky was bright blue and cloudless, and a brisk breeze guaranteed that we would find no fog on the plain.

We are, as you may gather, safely home. The car had changed colour, to a greyish sort of white, and if you touched any part of it you could feel the roughness of the salt coating it had acquired as we drove, but it's now been washed and restored to its original colour.

We have delivered assorted UK goodies (would you believe, paracetamol?) to grateful relatives, spent yesterday afternoon being deafened by rampaging descendants, and are now trying to get back to normal. We've watched the Magic Roundabout tape, so we can now pass it on to Alessandro. What he'll make of dialogue like ' "Are you speaking cosmically?" asked Florence' and ' "positively symbiotic", said Zebedee', is anyone's guess, but then the Magic Roundabout always was more fun for grownups than for children.

24^th February 1999

And now, the weather. Or rather, the effects of the weather on the Alps. After five or six years with relatively little snow, there's been a lot of heavy snow, pretty much all at once, over the past couple of weeks, over most of the Alps. Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of strong wind, which has tended to pile up the snow in rather unsteady drifts, and now the temperature has started to rise. Result, avalanches all over the place, from the Austrian Tyrol to Switzerland to France to Italy, with a lot of damage and, several deaths. I don't know an overall total, but I've heard of ten in the Tyrol, over twenty in France, and I know there were half a dozen in Italy in the last couple of days. The Gottard pass was closed today, the road from Aosta to Mongex was closed because the village had been hit by an avalanche, and all the locals still say that the risk of more avalanches is very high, as there's a forecast of more snow over the weekend, followed by rising temperatures.

I heard distinct frustration in a mountain rescue worker's voice today as she explained to a journalist that the job is being made more difficult by all the tourists from the plains who turn up ready to ski and get cross when they find that roads are closed. They don't seem to understand, she said, that we close them because we are concerned that they may be dangerous... She also said that part of the reason why the avalanches caused so much damage is that as mountain villages have expanded to provide accommodation for the tourists, new houses have been built in areas that are less safe than the traditional village nuclei - hence more likely to be hit by avalanches.

However, all of that is happening 'up there', while in Milan we have had the usual succession of dry, bright days, with a slightly chilly breeze from time to time. Temperatures are going up, we're heading for double figure maximums in town, and I don't think temperatures have gone below freezing at night for about a week. All of which brings me to the dilemma, should I or should I not take my teddy-bear fur coat (that's the fluffy pink thing, for those of you who may have seen it) to be dry-cleaned, or not? Being pink (from a very rare breed of nearly-extinct teddy bears, you understand) it doesn't stand up to dirt very well, and is currently a smudgy sort of grey, particularly around the hem - all that climbing in and out of trams - so it desperately needs to be cleaned. However, I'd really want to put it away after that, and I can't help thinking that if I do take it to the dry-cleaners, the weather will instantly revert to its worst depth-of- winter mode.

Why do so many human beings suffer from the delusion that if there is some sort of deity out there, it's one whose main form of entertainment is to watch them and make sure that Murphy's Law applies to their every action?

On that profound note, I shall leave you. We are expecting Guy and Simone to arrive tomorrow morning, so, their jet-lag permitting, we shall be busy doing host-type things for the next week or so. Communications, therefore, will be slightly delayed. Expect an exhausted but euphoric account hereafter.

8^th March

And a very happy International Women's Day to you, especially to all of you International Women!

We are recovering from much rushing about and far too much food, all of which occurred while Simone and Guy were staying with us last week. As well as the usual sights (Cathedral, Cathedral roof, Sforza castle) and some shopping, we took them to Piemonte so that we could spend a couple of days mostly outside, in real daylight, thus endeavouring to minimise the effects of jet-lag. I think they were quite impressed by the vast stick-fields (straight sticks are poplars, twisty sticks are vines, it's easy really) as well as by the food, food and more food... Oh yes, some wine, as well.

Fortunately the weather was quite mild (though a bit hazy) while we were out there, and it didn't start raining until two days after we got back into town. That meant we had to do indoor townie things, hence the shopping, and a couple of art exhibitions: Gustav Klimt and the Viennese Secessionists, very interesting, well laid out, fascinating: and some Leonardo drawings, much rarity value but particularly badly explained, i.e. not at all. I don't know about the others, but personally I wanted to know what all Leonardo's notes on the margins of his drawings said, and there was not even an outline explanation.

Anyway, it was a fun time even though I'm now in lots of little pieces from all the slow walking.

24^th March

For those of you who didn't know, and weren't there, we've just come back from an exhausting, but satisfying weekend of extempore blank verse, fiendish plotting, heroic battles and carousing, or, in other words, a weekend-long live game called 'Shakespeare's Lost Play'. Which is quite topical really, considering all the Oscars we got for it. Or was that for one of those film things?

Murray was actually doing some work before and after the weekend, which means he is even more zombified than I am. We got home yesterday about seven in the evening, and I think I was in bed before nine, having reached the stage where I was too tired to eat. I managed to avoid the tantrum stage but it was dangerously close.

You may like to know that the Witches (as in Macbeth, you know, the toil and trouble trio) managed to persuade Regan, Goneril and Cordelia to become followers of Hecate; Lady Macbeth was a pushover really; we didn't have quite enough time to persuade Joan of Arc to come back to us, but it was a close-run thing.

I told Caesar's fortune (I told quite a lot of fortunes, actually. By the way, Pete, I still have your Shakespeare Tarot deck, you can collect it when you come and see us), correctly guessing that Joan had been the one to summon him through time; found Romeo's lost child (well, one of them. He was careless enough to lose two); and contributed to various eerie spooky things. I can now tell you the answer to the time-honoured question "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" because the Witches delivered them. The answer is two, one by Richard III and one by Romeo. Don't ask.

Within the Lost Play, there were Oscar-deserving performances of 'Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter' (so you see he did write it), and 'Pulp Faustus' by nearly-Marlowe. Masterpieces both.

Oh, and extempore blank verse gets easier the more people around you are also speaking in blank verse. A poetic gravity effect?

After a weekend of English March weather (wind, tumbling grey clouds, very scenic), we're back to blue skies and not much activity in the way of atmospherics. More reliable, but less Shakesperean.

31^st March

I think I've added a couple of new names to this list recently, so I want to start by saying that this newsletter started out a year and a half ago as a means of keeping in touch with friends wholesale, as it were. It is not compulsory in any way, and anyone who gets bored with my messages only needs to let me know, and I'll take them off the list at once.

In general, life is back to normal after the Shakespeare weekend. We've had the photos developed, and Murray has spent unreasonable amounts of time scanning some of them and putting them onto our web page, so if you're curious you know where to look.

After a few days of torrential rain, the weather has decided to be untypical for Holy Week, and has turned sunny and pleasantly warm - I only took a light jacket with me when I went out today because I knew I was going to spend some time in the Metro, where it's cool and draughty. Meanwhile, plenty of Milanese people are doing what they did last year, i.e. walking around wearing coats and scarves and looking rather pink and shiny-faced with the heat.

Just as a minor point, the war in Yugoslavia is currently dominating the media here, and there is a lot of resistance against the 'normalization' of the war, particularly on the part of students, trade unions and the Left in general. I don't know if this high awareness of the war is partly due to the fact that the fighting is practically next door - the Adriatic is a very narrow sea, and when the bombers leave from the airfield near Padova it only takes them about an hour to get to their targets.

The born-again Communists have just decided that they will leave the Government if NATO doesn't agree to stopping the bombing over the Easter weekend. NATO seems quite unmoved by this threat (which doesn't surprise me entirely), but if the Communist party carries out its threat, the Government is going to fall, because it will lose its majority.

Meanwhile, refugees have started arriving, across that rather narrow bit of Adriatic that separates Albania from Puglia. Albanians have been coming across there for years, but everyone is concerned that this is going to be rather different. However, as one rather dejected-sounding priest said, the number of refugees out of Kosovo is limited by three factors: 1) how many are allowed out by the Serbian troops; 2) how many actually make it through the border to Albania; 3) how many have the money to pay the organized criminals who run the dinghies racket. He was working in an ex-military camp that is being made ready to house up to two thousand refugees, but, as he also pointed out, reports (while there were still reports) spoke of as many as four thousand people an hour trying to cross the border a couple of days ago.

About half an hour ago, a lot of radio stations here, including one of the national stations, all played a recording of the air raid sirens which are being heard in Belgrade. This was played for one minute, to mark the first week of war, and it was a pretty spooky sound. I don't like the thought that we can kill so many people in the first week of war. No phony wars any more, we go straight to business.

8^th April

Now that the Easter frenzy is over, it's about time you heard from me again. The more life feels "just ordinary", the less it seems I have to tell you that is worthwhile (and, of course, splendid - for those of you who are as yet unaware of the strange Hitchhikers' Guide malady I contracted many years ago, courtesy of Radio 4, you should realise that the phrase "splendid and worthwhile" is a quote from Episode 1 of said masterpiece.)

Just before Easter, Murray went to Bracknell for the day and came back with one of his colleagues, who was going to be doing some work in the Cernusco office the next day. I'm sure there was a logic to this... Anyway, we took Steve out for a walk around the Duomo and dinner in Brera, and as we were walking along Via Dante (now fully pedestrianised, and very pleasant on a warm evening) Steve noticed the display of sweets on one of the street stalls, and asked what the particularly showily-wrapped things were. Easter eggs, I said in a rather offhand way. "Oh," said Steve, "I hadn't realised. I suppose I'm used to seeing them in boxes." Which just shows you that "just ordinary" is no such thing.

Easter eggs in Italy are not normally packaged in boxes, they are placed on a little stand (this gives the egg a flat surface to stand on), then wrapped in brightly coloured foil paper, with a big bow at the top. What is more, it is felt that Easter eggs, being chocolate, do not need to be filled with more chocolates, so they all contain a surprise instead. This can range from the kind of icky plastic toy one might find in a cracker, to elaborate Lego creations, to assorted gifts for grown-ups. The quality of the surprise is generally related to the price of the egg. A clue to the contents is given by the label, which helpfully tells you things like "girl", "boy" (sexism in choice of toys! Mind you, if somebody had given me an Easter egg with a plastic figure of Ronaldo in it when I was a kid, I would probably have devised a way to kill somebody with it). Or, if you feel like being really creative, you can take your own gift to your local patisserie a few days in advance, and they will put it inside one of their own chocolate eggs.

Murray and I refuse to pay extortionate prices for poor quality chocolate, so we ignored Easter eggs this year, and bought ourselves a rather delicious lobster from the deli at the corner. And I made cassata, of course.

We took this to my brother Enrico, which was very selfless of us, because we had to endure hours of his progeny's idea of conversation, which involves shouting at anyone present at the top of their voices, preferably all at once. The foolish children don't even want to try cassata, so I don't know why I bother... Actually, the youngest showed some promise, in that he was quite eager to eat the tiny bits his mother gave him on a teaspoon. For those of you who don't know about cassata, there is a picture on our home page.

Over the Easter week-end, Milan was delightfully quiet. We heard on the radio about 20 km of queues on the motorways to the Adriatic resorts, while we walked about marvelling at the number of perfectly legal parking spaces that were empty all around us. Perhaps that's the solution to parking problems in the city: park all the cars on the motorways. Oh, I forgot, that's what they tried in London with the M25...

Easter was also a dress-rehearsal for summer, or so it seemed, as the weather was very sunny and very warm. I think maximums touched 25 degrees C. We went to see Marzia and Stefano, went for a walk along the Adda and up to Crespi, which is a 19th century factory village that's been preserved intact (and, in fact, there are people living in it) and is one of the Unesco World Heritage sites. It's a very strange place, built from scratch around a factory in order to house the workers, engineers, office staff etc. There is a mock-14th century castle in a very picturesque site on the river, which was the Crespi family home; some rather nice Art Nouveau villas for the top echelons of the staff; smaller houses, some of them semi-detached, all surrounded by tidy little gardens with low fences (how English!) for the lower ranks of white-collar workers, then some rather stark blocks of flats for the rank and file workers. There's nothing like keeping everyone in their proper place! The factory itself is a very impressive mock 14th century building, with Gothic windows and decorative brickwork. There's also a nicely mock-Renaissance church in a suitably prominent position.

Of course, the good weather meant that the bombings in Serbia went on unabated. One of the local radio's correspondents in Belgrade was describing how the people of the city were going to spend the night on the one surviving bridge, holding a vigil there in the hope that their presence would put off the bombers.

Since yesterday, the weather has returned to a much more normal pattern for April, being cool and wet. Of course, now they've switched the central heating off, so it's a good thing I haven't put away the big winter jumpers, they're going to be just the thing to wear in the house in a couple of days, as it keeps cooling down. The weather is set to stay grey and rainy until the weekend, they said on the radio. I rather hope it will be drier and warmer afterwards, if only for a week or so while Anna and Giulia come to visit.

The trees are pretty, though: the warm sunny weather has brought all the leaves out, and now the rain is washing them so they're staying bright pale green. And I saw the first swallows the other day. Oh yes, and four pipistrelles flying around above the courtyard at dusk. And as I walked home from shopping this afternoon, I had to stop and stare at a house with the most gorgeous wisteria that was trained up four floors (or was it five?), all covered in blossom and smelling absolutely heavenly.

19^th March

Hi there,

the shipboard computer has been recovered after having been dragged out of the control room to play Diablo (by two nieces and somebody who really should know better). There is still life at this end of the galaxy, though it's currently a rather tired life form, suffering (hmm, not really the right word. The process of getting tired was fun, it's the result I object to) from heavy doses of culture, long trips on trains followed by long walks, a couple of days of intensive gaming, too much food and an aftermath of intensive housework to bring everything back to a civilised level.

We can now start to keep in touch again for a few days. Then Hein and Ingeborg arrive, there's a game con in Vercelli, followed by the game convention in Modena the following weekend, then (I think) Pete arrives...

Normality will be restored just as soon as we know what is normal anyway. Share and enjoy.

4^th May

A word of warning for the few normal people among you, this letter deals mostly with three recent events: Hein and Ingeborg's visit, and the games cons in Vercelli and Modena, so if I start saying things that don't make sense to you, assume it's about roleplaying.

Hein and Ingeborg (for those of you who don't know them, they're Dutch, so you have to make allowances for them, but they don't wear orange, so it's all right to walk the streets with them) arrived on Saturday 24th, and just to throw them in at the deep end, we took them with us to have lunch with Marzia (Stefano was having lunch with some people he knew from university, and his lunch went on for many hours longer than ours). This was after having gone round and round a very small number of streets not too far from home while attempting to find a way to their hotel along which one was actually allowed to drive. We achieved this feat, and that was possibly our highest achievement all week.

Lunch with Marzia involved eating far too large a quantity of food, which is odd when you consider that Marzia is rather petite and eats less than almost anyone I know (below the age of 60), and not odd at all when you consider that she has clearly picked up her attitude towards guests from her mother. If this lady is anything like my mother, or indeed like any other Italian mother I know, her main concern will be to feed any guest to capacity and beyond, just in case they've accidentally been involved in a small famine recently.

Fortunately, lunch was followed by the now classic walk to the castle in Trezzo and along the Adda, so we were able to use up some of those excess calories. The castle in Trezzo is now a picturesque ruin, it dates from the time of the Visconti (1400 and something) and was strategically built on a spur of rock that dominates a bend in the river, so that if anyone they didn't like approached, or if the bargemen refused to pay the toll, the garrison could play Drop the Rock to their heart's content. There is a little notice by the entrance announcing guided visits to the bits that are locked behind barred gates, and that look to be the best from a gamer's point of view, since those gates lead to an inner courtyard and to some underground areas. Of course, we have never managed to be in the castle at any time even remotely close to when the guided visits are. Marzia keeps talking about arranging to hire the place for a live game, but I have a feeling that if she mentions vampires to the town council they won't be terribly keen.

On Sunday 25th, we took Hein and Ingeborg with us to Vercelli (go south-west, young man), where a bunch of weird gamers had just set up a games club and had organized a gathering. It would be excessive to call it a con, since most of the people there belonged to the club anyway, but it was full of friendly people. Mind you, there was the loony dressed up as a gnome with a bright yellow plastic chainsaw toy, and later he did turn up again dressed as Rat Man (a cross between Mickey Mouse and Superman, if you can strain your imagination that far. The costume was bright yellow, too. Perhaps he has a thing about bright yellow?), which just goes to show the difference between Weird Gamers and Executive Gamers - those of you who are not familiar with Eddie Izzard, see "Dress to Kill".

I am now firmly in the Executive Gamer section, having been introduced to sundry Vercelli Amberites as "the famous Emma Sansone". I got a group of said Vercelli Amberites together and confused them totally by running "The Falling Leaves of Yggdrasill", which completely discards whole essential sections of the Amber game, like all of the background and the two major powers. Two of the players didn't care, because they were munchkins who had never played a diceless game before, and whose idea of creating a character was to ask whether they could have an axe that flies to its target and comes back to its owner (I was tempted to say yes, and always make it come back to the head rather than the hand), and a helmet with horns that spout fire. I vetoed the latter idea as not Norse enough, you'll be glad to know. Fortunately, the munchkins had to go and catch a train reasonably early, which left the people with brains to work out what they should do about catching Loki, and, more importantly, what they should do with him once they had him.

Oh yes, before all that we went for a walk round the centre of Vercelli, led by a very nice local Amberite called Angela, who was being pulled along by a huge black dog that weighed as much as she did. We saw a very fine church (Sant'Andrea) and a deeply ugly one (the Duomo), plus lots of lovely narrow streets with fine buildings desperately needing restoration to their former glory. Since Vercelli has outskirts whose profound and barren ugliness can only be compared to that of Piazzale Loreto in Milan (which is the ugliest square in Milan, and possibly in the whole of Italy), I don't understand why people don't return to the city centre in droves, buy up the near-derelict buildings for a pittance, do them up and live in style. But they're not modern! I hear them cry, which may be explanation enough. Actually, it may be that they're derelict because they don't cost a pittance, so you'd have to spend twice as much money, first to buy them, then to make them habitable.

Back to the games: there weren't really enough English-speaking gamers free to interact with Hein and Ingeborg, who were being very polite but obviously getting bored. So Murray drove them to Casale, where they walked round all afternoon, looking at towers and the fortress, and stopping for ice-cream. Meanwhile, I was concluding the game with a universe-rocking revelation.

Possibly the saddest thing of all was the fact that, in the shift between various tables, I put down the box of liquorice that Hein and Ingeborg had brought from Holland, and completely forgot about it during the game and, in fact, until we were half way home. I must explain here to all non-Dutch people on the list that liquorice seems to be an essential fuelling element of games in the Netherlands, and is consumed in industrial quantities, much as tortilla chips are in more US-oriented environments.

On Monday the 26th I took Hein and Ingeborg to the Sforza Castle, this being one of the few things that is open in Milan on a Monday morning. After the usual round, we actually managed to get down to the cellar bit where they keep the Roman inscriptions. This was not spectacular, but I think it will repay further examination, because, basically, there is a lot of stuff to read. It was also one of the best labelled, best explained and best organised bit of the museum, and of course it's one of the bits that is most often closed because nobody knows it's there so nobody goes to see it... We also went to the Egyptian bit, also underground, very small, poorly set out and rather a disappointment after the British Museum and Turin, or even the Allard Pierson in Amsterdam. To make things worse, it was periodically invaded by waves of yelling schoolkids, who flowed through in the manner of Genghis Khan, followed by ineffectual teachers bleating for silence, and then rapidly vanished, only to be replaced within a few minutes by a different horde. I now have personal experience of what the ancient Romans felt when the barbarians came trooping in from the east.

We spent the last part of the afternoon in the Rinascente, by way of an ice cream and Via Dante (beating off gypsy would-be pickpocket: Jules, you are not alone!), and considered a suit for Hein.

That evening, we went out to a restaurant in Brera which I've probably mentioned before, the Orient Express, with its pretend station bar and pretend platform, where we have had lunch in the past. This time we had dinner in the pretend carriage, and a very sumptuous dinner it was, though Hein's choice was rather limited by the fact that all the most splendid dishes were fish-based, and he doesn't like the stuff... Personally, I thought it was excellent, though their spaghetti with lobster was a bit of a misnomer, since it was really a lobster with a few strands of spaghetti, but well, why complain? Many thanks again, Hein and Ingeborg!

On Tuesday 27th, it was grey and rainy. We went to the Ambrosiana library to look at the exhibition of Leonardo drawings, which I enjoyed more this time despite its continuing lack of explanations. However, Hein made his Spot Hidden roll afterwards, in the ticket office and gift shop, and found the reason: they were selling a catalogue, which has a good introduction to what Leonardo was doing in Milan, the organisation of the Atlantic Codex, and explanations for each exhibited drawing, reproductions of them all, plus some extra reproductions of other works. So of course I bought a copy, and have started reading some bits of it. No English version, though. Hein bought a poster of Leonardo's drawing of the mortars with fragmentation bombs, which is sadly topical after what happened to that bus in Bosnia the other day.

After a sandwich lunch in a rather nice cafe' place, we found that it had stopped raining, so we went to visit the Duomo, including the excavations under the west door, the monument to the Unknown Amberite, and the roof, where I impressed the custodians so much with my knowledge of the Hidden Secrets (I was pointing out the carvings of the frog, the pickaxe and climbing boots, and the tennis racket and boxing gloves) that they revealed to me the location of the head of Mussolini and the carvings of the Fascist symbols. So now I know.

We proceeded to the Rinascente, where Hein bought a suit and I tried to persuade the sales assistant that I have now brought so many friends to buy suits there that I really deserve a commission, but he didn't fall for that.

I don't remember much of Wednesday 28th, I think I did domestic things while Hein and Ingeborg went exploring Avalon (no, not that Avalon, the games shop) and the comics shop. There were lots of comics Hein wanted, but they were either in Japanese or in Italian, neither of which was very useful to him.

On Thursday 29th Murray took a day off, and we drove to Sirmione on Lake Garda. We survived the motorway, which was hosting an Outsize Loads Con, and found that the view of Lake Garda is currently being restored, in preparation for the Jubilee Year. At least, this was the only possible explanation for the complete lack of view in any direction, and the mist was clearly serving the same purpose that white plastic sheeting serves on the front of buildings. The castle was still fun, even though you couldn't see either shore from it. It's still a good place to run around, though it has far too many towers to climb when your knees are getting to the wavering stage. It also offers a very good place from which to scout out the location of somewhere to eat, and this we did.

After lunch, we walked to the remains of the Roman villa, which is more like a whole village, with vast rooms and passages, none of whose functions were explained. We were hoping to find out more in the little museum by the entrance, but of course it was closed, and looked completely empty, so we shall never know. The view from the very tip of the peninsula would normally be stunning, but as I said, it had been cancelled for the day. We returned by way of many gift shops which stocked gifts ranging from the outrageously pricy to the impressively ugly, and though I sighed after a lovely plate, I decided that it was not only expensive, but also from Deruta, which is in Umbria and has nothing to do with the Garda at all, so I left it alone, and ended up buying a deck of Tarot cards with Norse designs instead. These are even less to do with Lake Garda, but I had been looking for a deck with a Norse design for a long time, and who knows whether I'd ever find them again?

On Friday 30th we went to see the Darsena and the Navigli (all right, so it's a bit silly to take Dutch people to see canals) on the way to Sant'Eustorgio (sheathed in white plastic, alas, and with the Cappella Portinari closed to the public for restoration work), then to San Lorenzo (scaffolding all round the back, which is the prettiest bit, but at least we could go down to the foundations). The finishing touch was given by the digging work that's going on in the bit of greenery that is pompously called The Park of the Basilicas, between Sant'Eustorgio and San Lorenzo, so that was it, really. This Jubilee year is really getting in the way of people who want to do tourism now!

We did find some very splendid shops along Corso di Porta Ticinese (linking one church to the other), but they were so splendid they had unapproachable prices, mostly relating to utterly gorgeous hand-woven silk creations in stunning colours, of the sort where you know that if you can't afford a servant to look after them, you don't even have to bother about asking the price. Sigh.

We concluded the day with a brief visit to San Satiro, so that they could admire its party trick, which I shall not reveal to those of you who haven't seen it, otherwise San Satiro will get all depressed.

And among all this, the culture was interspersed with evenings playing Kahuna (well, I watched, as it looked like a fiendishly strategic game) and Baron Munchhausen, which was fun because it entails drinking and telling silly stories, which, as you know from my letters, I have had some practice at.

On Saturday 1st of May, we drove to Modena for GiocaModena, formerly known as MiniMod. We found that it had been brilliantly organised, because all the Magic players were in a room to themselves, upstairs; the wargamers, whether traditional or Warhammerish, were banished to a completely different building; and the club's usual rooms were left in the hands of us weird roleplayers (fiendish laughter). Not that there were many of us - I think the numbers got as high as two dozen at one point, with three whole games going on simultaneously, but of course we were the select few.

So, as soon as we had sorted out our hotel, we started producing props such as toy foils, muster shirts, cloaks and crowns, and got involved in an "On Stage!" game covering part of the plot of the Three Musketeers. A good time was had by all, I think, but particularly by the musketeers who lost no opportunity to cry "One for All and All for One!" and strike dramatic poses. I hope the photos come out. I got to play the Queen, and simultaneously do the subtitles in English for Hein and Ingeborg. Hein got to play the Earl of Buckingham, so of course he spoke English, and I found myself automatically translating into Italian...

After a late and much-needed lunch I ran "Yggdrasill" (I think I can now consider "Yggdrasill" as fully 'played out'), while Hein gained many points according to whatever Experience system you wish to use by running "Ragnarok" with a group of English-speaking players. From what I hear, the game went very well, and all the players were able to cope with the language with very few problems, so I hope that after this I can counter the "but I couldn't play in English" argument against coming to AmberCon. That only leaves the lack of holiday argument, the lack of money argument, and the horrible exchange rate argument, which is really a subset of the lack of money argument. Ah well.

Murray took Hein and Ingeborg to the station (unfortunately, they had pre-paid their hotel in Milan, so they couldn't stay the night in Modena) and then we started a game of Babylon 5, with the "On Stage!" rules but round a table rather than live action, as it were. It would be a bit difficult to get the costumes, for a start... I was too tired to contribute much to that one, though Londo Mollari and G'Kar did a fine job of insulting each other and raging most theatrically, and Morden was suitably slimy.

We returned to our hotel and collapsed.

Sunday was rather slower, I got some people involved in the Amber game I'm running for Murray, Marzia and Stefano, and some of the characters were really interesting and would have fitted in wonderfully, but because other events were going on, I kept losing some players, so the whole thing was rather fragmented, and by mid-afternoon I lost concentration and had to stop, rather in the middle of things. I now have some players in Pavia, as well as some potential players in Vercelli, and Marzia and Stefano in Trezzo. This means, for those of you without maps of Lombardy, three different directions out of Milan, so life could get interesting. I'll think of something.

The weekend ended with a stunning meal in a place whose name I have forgotten, but whose flavours are not easily forgotten, in the company of Marzia, Stefano, Paola and two more of their friends, Giuseppe and Anna, talking about vampires, investigators, musketeers, "be a bear", Cthulhu, with occasional references to the Countess and numerous quotes from Star Wars. I don't think we frightened any of the other customers, but the waitress did put us in a room off to one side, on our own... You can't trust these weird gamers, you know.

We're home, it's Tuesday, I've watered my mother's plants and been to the market, so life must be back to normal. Never mind, Pete is arriving soon (with a copy of Castle Falkenstein and more videos than are good for us). That will raise the insanity levels.

19^th May

I think I ought to let you know we're still alive. Haven'd drowned yet, despite sudden attempts by Toutatis to drop the sky on our heads. Rain has been sweeping through northern Italy in sudden, brief but violent waves, with lots of thunder and lightning and sudden lakes appearing in our streets thanks to the inefficiency of the drains.

Meanwhile, despondency has been spreading through the fishermen in the north Adriatic, thanks to our fearless NATO allies who have been carelessly disposing of bombs in Italian territorial waters without telling anyone in Italy about it. A couple of such unexploded devices were caught up in nets a few days ago, and a few fishermen were rather badly hurt. Not unreasonably, all the rest of the fishermen have decided not to go out there and risk becoming casualties of friendly bombs, whose smartness is increasingly in question. Anyway, according to Betjeman, all friendly bombs should actually be sent to Slough...

Instead, it seems that some friendly bombs were dropped, of all places, in Lake Garda (which is well known for being one of Milosevic's secred hideout bases...) and off the coast of Chioggia, which is only a few miles down the coast from Venice. Is the evil Milosevic planning to hide out in the Grand Canal? The world needs to know. Inhabitants of the coastal regions wouldn't mind being told, either.

Much of the Italian Adriatic coast is, in fact, rather concerned by the closeness of the war, partly because of the expected arrival of more refugees (the rubber dinghy pirates are still doing a roaring trade, shipping desperate people across for thousands of DMarks at a time), and partly because the perceived closeness may scare off the summer tourist trade. Which is a poor excuse to be against the war, I suppose. However, the growing discontent in the country has prompted a debate in Parliament today, which has led to a rather hazily-worded resolution (in my opinion) that the Government shall put pressure on NATO to achieve a cessation of the bombings coinciding with the beginning of talks. As expected, the Northern League, Forza Italia and the MSI (read: neo-Fascist) all voted against, but the resolution has passed anyway.

Oh, and yesterday our new President was formally sworn in (what's the proper term?) and installed. In case you're interested, he's Ciampi, the finance wizard who actually managed to get Italy into line with the requirements for joining the Euro countries. His reputation is generally good; in fact, the only reason most people could think why he shouldn't be President was that his election would leave a huge gap in the Finance Ministry, and nobody seems good enough to fill that. Actually, thinking back on it, most of our Presidents have been pretty good people, it's our former Prime Ministers who have caused all the problems...

Enough of this politics stuff. I know it's serious, but I get very frustrated when I hear them going on and on and I can't actually influence their decisions.

Murray and I are going to see Marzia and Stefano this evening, to try out a new story-telling card game devised by their friend Anna. This would be an unmitigated Good Thing, apart from the fact that we're expected to be there at 9.30, which really means that there's no hope of getting a reasonable amount of sleep tonight. The concept of meeting up as early as possible in order to have a reasonably long evening in which to play does seem to escape most people here. Perhaps it's because nobody contemplates the possibility of junk food while you're playing, which, while it's an attitude that must contribute to the generally healthier complexions and trimmer waistlines of the gamers I have seen here, also severely limits the time available for games.

On the domestic front, did I tell you that we rearranged the furniture in our living room? Headline stuff, I hear you cry. This is because Murray had got tired of seeing videos of rather nice films on our old and very tiny TV, where you can't see the swords properly, and all the galloping horses look like Shetland ponies, so he had gone out and bought a new and very large TV. I agree that the spaceships in B5 (we're finally getting to the last few episodes) look much better when they're bigger, but the new TV didn't fit in the space where the old one was, and this meant that we had to dismantle and reassemble the whole lot. Fortunately, this happened while Pete was staying with us, so we conned him into helping. Unfortunately, it meant that we also rearranged the contents of the shelves, and have decided that - yes, you guessed it, we need more shelves. The good news (this is beginning to sound like one of those games on "I'm sorry, I haven't a clue") is that we could buy another bookcase like the ones we have. The bad news is that Murray's nice, red, air-conditioned car is not a hatchback, and therefore the flat pack won't fit inside it. Pause while we reconsider.

What other news? My parents are back in town after a long stay in Sicily, overseeing repairs to the damage done by last autumn's freak whirlwind storm. This is a good thing, because at least for a while I won't have to go and collect their mail, pay their bills and water my mother's plants! I occasionally think that it would be a lot cheaper if they stopped renting their apartment in town and simply went to a hotel every time they want to come here. Of course, that would mean finding a place for their furniture and, more terrifying still, my father's books...

I think this should do for today. A friend of a friend should be turning up soon to collect a translation (the first bit of work I've done in months!), and I have absolutely no idea how much money to ask for. I'll let you know.

25^th May

among the everyday stories of Milan folk, one stands out as being not so much a story of Milan folk, as a story of Milanisti folk.

Milanisti, I should explain, are the fans of A.C. Milan, who express their devotion by the ritual wearing of red and black striped football shirts, and much waving of similarly striped flags. Both these activities reached a frenzied peak last Sunday, when, by the arcane calculations of points awarded for kicking balls into nets, Milan won the championship.

I have no idea who Milan were actually playing on Sunday (football matches are played on Sunday here, remember), but I know that the race for the top place had been reduced to two teams, Milan and Lazio, and that although they would not in fact be playing each other, if Milan won and Lazio lost, then the championship went to Milan.

The deep-seated rivalry between the cities of Milan and Rome may have had something to do with the fervour with which these matches were awaited, but then the even deeper-seated rivalry between the two Milan teams (Inter and Milan) and the two Rome teams (Roma and Lazio) meant that some people were going through deep anguish, as, for example, were the Interisti who were torn between the wish to see Milan lose, and the wish not to see a Roman team win. Or consider the plight of the fervent Roma fan, who could not bear the thought of Lazio winning the championship, but was equally aghast at the prospect of the Berlusconi-owned team getting to the top.

It's the sort of life choice that ought to put any sensible person off football for ever...

Fortunately, everybody in my family is immune to the football virus, and we were enjoying a quiet afternoon at my parents' flat, when there was a sudden outburst of young voices outside, closely followed by much beeping of car horns. "Oh," we said, "does that mean that Milan has won?". We went to look out from the balcony. It did.

It so happens that the offices of A.C. Milan are in the building exactly across the road from where my parents live, and therefore Via Turati became something of a shrine to which devoted pilgrims made their noisy and flag-waving way. The first on the scene were a number of young children, somewhere between the ages of five and ten, whose mothers were having quite a difficult time, trying to stop them running into the road and waving their Milan flags at every passing car. There followed quite a few older fans, but most of the noise was being made by the flood of cars and scooters driving past, all of them dutifully waving the red and black stripes, and hooting and beeping in triumph. A huge red and black banner appeared from the club office windows, and was soon followed by other, smaller flags being displayed at other windows.

Apparently there was a huge improptu gathering in Piazza Duomo, and when we got home we found that Corso Buenos Aires was serving its usual function as a racing track for flag-waving scooters. Numerous sellers of Milan flags, scarves and other paraphernalia appeared, as if by magic, on the pavements of Corso Buenos Aires, leading me to wonder whether all these goods had been conjured up just after Milan had won, or whether they had been prepared earlier. If so, what would they all have done with the stuff if Lazio had won? I doubt there would have been much of a market for Lazio goods here. But perhaps each pavement stall had its twinned opposite in Rome, and they were pledged to share any profits equally... No, I don't think so either.

The sad corollary to all this is what happened that Sunday night on a train that was making its way back to Salerno from, I think, Perugia, with its infuriated cargo of Salerno fans. Apparently, Salerno came bottom of the league, and next season will be demoted to Serie B. In a spectacular display of senseless rage, the Salerno fans on the train proceeded to rip up seats, compartment doors, toilets, smash lights and windows and, in several carriages, to set things on fire. This last activity was not only senseless, but incredibly stupid, especially as the train was crossing the Appennines at the time, and was in a very long tunnel - about 10 km. One of the fires caught better than intended, and went out of control.

Somebody pulled the emergency brake, but the driver managed to get the train out of the tunnel despite this. As a result, the emergency services were able to get to the fire relatively quickly, and there were only four dead, eight or nine people hurt from burns or smoke inhalation, and a lot of minor injuries and shock. Considering what happened just weeks ago in the Mont Blanc tunnel, things could have gone much, much worse.

Whatever I say after that, it will look either sanctimonious or flippant. I could resort to the ever-safe topic of the weather... Since the beginning of May, it's been strangely cool, cloudy and humid, with quite a lot of rain on the hills and on the Alps (witness Hein and Ingeborg, on the trip to Lake Garda in which the view was cancelled, and Pete, on the trip to Lake Maggiore in which the view was not only cancelled, but washed out altogether). While this has been an inconvenience on this side of the Alps, it has been a much more serious matter on the north side, where there have been land slides and there are flood alerts in various parts of Switzerland and Bavaria. For the past couple of days it's been sunny, if hazy, and temperatures have started going up towards the seasonal normal. Time for the mosquito net soon.

Any other news? I finally decided to send Lucky the teddy bear back to its school in Wisconsin by post, as there was no chance of anyone heading that way in time to be useful to the class, and I didn't want to trust to the random air passenger method of getting him home, since I suspect that airport security must have got even tighter than normal with the war. Murray packed him into a wine box (I hope this won't shock the teacher, but then there is quite a number of wine-related material in the bear's backpack... Ah well, they'll just have to cope) and I took said box to the post office, where I had to fill in many customs forms (one of them in triplicate, another one in quadruplicate!) detailing the contents of the box, its value and provenance. There was no space to explain that the bear was actually a U.S. national returning home, and that the papers in its pack were from Italy, the UK, France, Germany and Spain, so I listed them as "publicity leaflets, maps and souvenirs", and I hope that will do. I hope Lucky's European trip widens the kids' horizons. Have any of you who sent e-mail messages or postcards heard from the class? We haven't had any kind of reply.

Time to see to some food, and then revise some more Star Wars. Well, I decided that it had been years since I had seen the trilogy, and that I needed to refresh my memory in preparation for seeing the new film when we come to AmberCon. I shall then lend the tapes to my brother, whose little boy Alessandro is so well-versed in the story that as he watches the tape he does all the actions just before the characters do. He includes a lot of sound effects, but doesn't join in with the dialogue, but that's because he's very economical with words in general. Anyway, I think he'll enjoy the revised version with the new bits.

3^rd June

Milan is in a situation where there's water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. At least in some areas, and if you live above the fourth floor.

You may remember the trouble we had in the winter, when the heavy rains combined with the rising water table and flooded some Metro stations. Well, the water table is still rising, and the water board is having to pump thousands of litres of water a day into the sewers, because they don't want underground stations, people's basements, garages, store rooms to flood, but they can't use the water for any domestic purpose because it's polluted. It's polluted because it's gradually rising through polluted layers of ground, of course, and they're polluted because of what was dumped in landfills by heavy industry twenty years ago. (The drinking water comes from much deeper wells.)

In order to use that water for anything other than washing the streets (which are far, far more polluted) Milan would need a water purifier plant, which we still don't have. Apparently there have been plans for one for years, but our previous Fearless Leaders did not think it important enough to actually do anything about it. So, in the middle of this heat (since last week-end, temperatures in the mid-30s from about midday to about five in the afternoon), we have a continuing flood emergency.

Meanwhile, the water board (or water company, or whatever it is - I think it's actually still owned by the city) is in the middle of repairing one of its pumping stations, and the repairs have coincided with the beginning of summer temperatures. This means that instead of pumping eight thousand litres of water per minute, it's pumping seven thousand, and that's enough of a fall that, in the area served by the pumping station, water pressure has dropped significantly. Add to this the fact that everybody is using more water as a reaction to the heat, and what you get is a large number of people living above the fourth floor in the north-west area of Milan who get no water at all during the daytime, and a sad trickle at night when demand falls.

All of which is reminiscent of areas of southern Italy, with the important difference that there the water is pumped to different areas of the town in turn so that each building's tanks can fill up. Here, we're used to having mains water round the clock, and the buildings have no tanks - an example of the way progress can cause problems sometimes.

Murray is currently in the Netherlands, though he may be on his way to Spain by now, who knows. There was a moment of panic just before he left, because the office changed his portable a little while ago, and the new one has a lead with a three-pin plug. Now, when you're rushing around Europe to work, you need to be able to plug in your portable, which, thanks to the delightful idiosyncracies (did I spell that correclty?) of the various nations, is not an easy thing to do. Buy an adaptor, you may cry. We did, I reply, and guess what? It will only take two-pin plugs, and is therefore completely useless. Fortunately, Murray found a lead in his magic box of strange wires, plugs and connector things, that could connect to the portable and had an English plug. We were then able to plug that into an English-to-assorted continental plugs adaptor, and the world was safe for technocracy.

All of which leads me to the question, what on earth will happen if anyone dares to suggest to the EU that all our different electric and phone plugs and sockets need to be harmonised? I expect an outcry rising from whichever fourteen countries have to change their standard to suit the fifteenth...

Actually, some minor harmonisation is coming into Italy by the back door, because all new electrical appliances now have those ghastly German plugs (the round ones with the recessed sockets), and you can only change them on pain of invalidating the guaranteee. Therefore, there are many adaptors and leads being sold with dual-standard, Italian and German sockets. Of course, all electricians tell you that you shouldn't use adaptors or extensions on appliances like fridges and washing machines, but that's because they want you to pay them lots of money to come and make a hole in your wall.

There, you'd missed my utilities and workmen rants, hadn't you?

There was a brief pause there, because the sun has now dropped below the buildings across the road, and, what is more, there is a breeze, so I went and opened all the windows and put things by all the doors to stop them slamming. I really ought to invest in a few of those basic wedge doorstops.

On a larger scale, you may be amused to know that the age of the sale of indulgences is not dead. Today the news told of the arrest of two financial administrators, who had been involved in corrupt dealings to do with the building and restoration work in Rome, in connection with the Jubilee. Some traditions never die.

Oh, and it seems to be good news from Belgrade!

16^th June

A few odds and ends to tell you about. After some days of spectacular thunderstorms (dark leaden clouds, forked lightning, wall-shaking thunder) the stormy weather seems to have moved on. While it was here, it's managed to do horrible things to quite a lot of the grain harvest - this is June, the barley is almost ripe and the wheat isn't far behind, and if there was any hail it won't have done the grapes any good either. This would be sad, because so far '99 promised to be nearly as good as '98.

'98, from what all the producers have been telling us, was spectacular. One of them was enthusing that it's the sort of year that happens once in a producer's life, if he's lucky. Of course, none of the special '98 vintage is going to be bottled for a while yet, and when it is, I don't expect to be able to afford any of the Barolo or Barbaresco, even if I could find it on sale. Apparently, a lot of it is already booked.

The elections, meanwhile, where a sad affair, with record low turnout - a mere 75 per cent, which should still make all British politicians jealous. I don't think the UK proportion of voters reaches that high in most general elections... The sad thing is, that the Left has been squabbling a lot lately, which has led to the formation of two new parties as people left their old parties in a huff, and this has split the vote, particularly in the European elections. I don't know whether Italian politicians will ever get it into their little grey cells (if they have any) that just because you disagree with somebody in your party it doesn't mean you have to go off and be a triumvirate on your own. I mean, look at the Labour and Conservative lot! I bet Blair isn't that fond of Ken Livingstone, but that doesn't mean either of them has founded a separate party. That ghastly Berlusconi guy has been crowing on his pet TV stations ever since. Things weren't quite so disastrous in the regional council elections, but still, not a good result, apart from the slight consolation that Alleanza Nazionale (read: Fascists) got even fewer votes than the Italian Communists.

And despite the latest misadventures with animal food pellets, dioxin, chickens and eggs (which came first, the chicken or the egg? Actually, it was a dead cow and some re-generated mineral oil...), the Green vote was barely over 1 per cent. Which is very depressing. I mean, Belgium, man, Belgium!

Did Douglas Adams know something we don't know?

And now, that panic over all the Coke brand beverages in tins. France has banned their sale until they can check that the contents are safe - of course, this depends what you mean by safe... But I bet the Pepsi guys are really, really pleased.

Time to go.

30^th June

It's time to let you know that we're still here, we haven't been struck by lightning, and that life goes on. All around us, preparations for the holidays are taking place: my brother Emanuele with his wife and their little boy have been in Abruzzo all week, down by the Adriatic (hopefully nowhere near any spare American bombs), and will be back at the end of this week; my brother Enrico's wife and children are getting ready to go to Sardinia for a month with his wife's parents - Enrico is looking forward to having the house to himself, and not having kids with alleged nightmares come and wake him up in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, my parents are in Sanico, cowering inside the house and hiding from the elephant-sized mosquitoes.

I have been struggling to get some sense out of the players in the Rocky Horror Chaos Show game (well, with a title like that, I suppose you can't expect them to be sensible people) so that I could make sense of the background notes to send them. Meanwhile, I have been chewing metaphorical nails (this does me exactly as much good as chewing real nails, and leaves my hands looking as if they belong to a human being, which is useful for deceiving the natives) over the much more complex question of the Fourth Quartet game. For all non-gamers: don't worry about this. For all gamers: several of you already know what I'm talking about, and a few of you are my players, so I won't go into detail.

Does anybody know why it is that, with all day at my disposal, I am quite capable of walking up and down the house picking things up and putting them down again somewhere else, metaphorically chewing nails until I could reduce a Mandarin to the status of a mere peasant, and I can only gather will and ideas to sit down and do something after six in the afternoon? And even then it might be just writing something like this, instead of weaving fiendish plots for the heroes to foil.

And then, just as I'm getting into my stride, I realise that it's time to do something about eating tonight. If only food wasn't so important and time-consuming. Ah well, it's more aubergines 'alla parmigiana' and courgettes and stuff. I'll be epic another time.

6^th July

All the delights of summer in the city are here again: the heat, the humidity, the insect life...

Temperatures yesterday reached a high of 35 C, and were only marginally lower during the previous few days. This means that I keep the windows closed all day, and the shutters shut on whichever side the sun is, in an effort to keep the house cooler than the outside. This works, up to a point - the thermostat was showing 28 degrees indoors yesterday - but unfortunately there's nothing I can do about the humidity in the air, so life hasn't been particularly comfortable. Yesterday I felt almost ill, and was rescued by Murray who, paladin-like, came home bearing a very large electric fan as a trophy. He assembled it, and it has been running almost non-stop ever since.

As soon as the temperature starts dropping (some time after dark) I go round the house and open all the windows, to try to cool down the air in the house. This has the unfortunate side-effect of letting in all sorts of flying night-life, therefore we have to live surrounded by clouds of insecticide vapour and ultrasounds. I bought the little ultrasound-emitting gadget in order to use it in the kitchen, where I don't really want insecticide wafting in the air. It's about the size of a large adaptor plug, and supposedly it emits ultrasounds which confuse insects, so that they are unable to fly, let alone sting. There is, of course, no way I can verify this, since I can't hear the ultrasounds, but since the kitchen window is wide open, the lights are on, and I haven't been attacked by swarms of evil stinging aliens, I assume it must be doing something.

Today, we decided that enough was enough, and Murray went and bought a portable air conditioner. The idea is that we'll be able to sleep, the room will be quieter as well as cooler and less humid (as the days get hotter, more and more people are around later into the night, so you get loud conversations under the windows as people go home at one in the morning), and I'll be able to move the air conditioner into the study in the afternoon, when I want to use the computer.

And despite all this, last Saturday we were mad enough to go traipsing round a field looking at a Roman re-enactment event. Admittedly, it wasn' t quite so humid there, but it was desperately hot, and the only shade was to be found by standing very close to the walls of the castrum. Yes, they had set up a castrum (no ditches or ramparts, though, much to my disappointment), with proper Roman tents inside. They are, in fact, remarkably similar to modern tents, which are their direct descendants.

There was what the leaflet described as 'part of the Via Fulvia', but this was really a dig the size of our living-room, with lots of not very flat stones along the bottom, so we weren't that impressed. Apparently there is more stuff underground, because the place was a Roman trading settlement for about four centuries, but the local archaeology people don't have the money to dig it up, let alone maintain it once it's uncovered. Which was what this event was all about: they were trying to attract public attention, and public funding.

There was supposed to be a Roman market, but we wandered round a couple of educational stalls showing what fruit and vegetables the Romans used to eat, and then got bored, and went to talk to the gladiators instead.

This was very good, the gladiators are a group of people who research the fighting skills very thoroughly and their scholarship is recognised by several Italian universities. They make their own armour and some of the weapons, and they practice the fights, because, as they told us, it's the only way to find out whether a move described in a text works or not. They did a brief fight demonstration later that afternoon, which was very impressive because neither fight was choreographed, they were both real practice bouts. The bruises were for real too - weapons are blunt, of course (as they were in the majority of fights in the arena), and the gladiators tend to pull their blows, but that doesn't always work.

There was a moderate number of legionaries, from various different periods of the empire, I was impressed by the quality of the costumes, armour and, in particular, the shoes, most of which looked hand-made according to the pattern of proper caligae. There were a couple of impressive-looking officers and standard-bearers, and one very stunning cavalry officer on an extremely stunning black horse, a high-spirited thing that wasn't at all happy about the heat and hated flash lights (a few attempts at rearing), but which was very well-trained in dressage. Of course, I have absolutely no idea whether that's the sort of thing any Roman officer would have bothered to teach his horse, but it looked pretty.

The depressing thing about the event was the appalling standard of the women's costumes. There were about as many women as men, and I got the definite impression that they were only there so they wouldn't be sitting at home getting bored. The amount of nylon and gold braid reminded me of the kind of thing that used to be prevalent among the Sealed Knot in the old days. I have the impression that nobody was interested in putting the same amount of effort in researching and making the women's costumes and accessories, as had gone into researching and making the gladiators' and legionaries'; and it seemed to me that the attitude was, 'It's Roman, so I'll take some shiny nylon, make a sort of tunic pinned at the shoulders, sew lots of gold braid round the neck and hem so I can look more showy than all the other women, and I'll wear an ordinary pair of sandals, after all, who can tell the difference?' So the result was disastrous.

Equally disastrous was the dancing. Why people insist on re-creating dances for cultures where we have no record of the music is entirely beyond me. All right, so a few groups of pretty girls got up on stage and, from time to time, struck poses that reproduced the kind of things you see painted on vases, but there were long stretches between these poses where the dancing was unmistakeably 20th century contemporary stuff (so was the music), despite the tunics, the crowns of poppies and the laurel branches. It's the sort of thing that gives historical re-enactments a bad name.

The chariot racing, on the other hand, was fun. All right, so the chariots were being pulled by two rather than four horses (and two of the teams were having trouble with that, because the horses didn't seem used to running together in step, and the chariots bounced all over the place), but two of the teams were clearly very experienced, with well-matched horses, and though the actual race was a foregone conclusion, (it was won by a chariot pulled by a gorgeous pair of dapple greys who races as smoothly as if they had been on a proper race-course instead of on a recently harvested field) it was exciting.

Fortunately, we had brought along a bottle of partly frozen water, which gradually melted as the afternoon wore on, so we were able to keep sipping something cool. That, the wide-brimmed hats and the factor 30 sun cream kept us both safe until we decided that we had seen enough, and we ran off in our cool car.

The weekend (we were staying in Sanico with my parents) was completed by a visit from a cousin of mine, with wife and one-year old child, and all that that entails. Fortunately, the child was generally cheerful, so there were no great traumas.

The worst bit was arriving back in town on Sunday night, and finding that somebody had draped layers of hot wet cotton wool over everything - at least, that's the way things felt. So despite the fact that there are various exhibitions going on which I want to see, I haven't felt up to actually going and doing anything about it.

Murray has arrived, bearing a very large air conditioner. It's about the size of R2D2, though not as cute. I'll let you know if it starts playing holographic messages for help.

5^th August

It's time for a quick recap of recent events. As some of you know to your cost, we spent a whirwind week in the UK, with Murray even managing to do some work in Bracknell in between essential trips to see friends, to the cinema (neither of us have any inclination to see "Star Wars: the Phantom Menace" dubbed into Italian), to the Dreamlands, to medieval Japan and to AmberCon. Those of you who were there know what happened, and we'd like to thank you all for the wonderful, if madly rushed, time we had.

I even managed to avoid all garlic until after the Con, which meant that complete exhaustion did not set in until the Sunday night. This, after all, is only reasonable, since everyone else was feeling worn out too (apart from some people who are depressingly young).

The drive back was tiring but uneventful. France was very French, we talked about the games all the time we were driving back and therefore didn't even listen to the Hitchhiker tapes; then we crossed into Switzerland, where it seems that summer has been cancelled this year because it was grey and raining, though not quite as hard as it had been when we drove north. We had to drive through Switzerland because, as you probably know, the Mont Blanc tunnel is still closed after that terrible fire earlier this year. Not a cheerful thought to reflect on as you enter the Gotthard tunnel... Our main source of reassurance was that the Gotthard is run by the Swiss.

However, Basel is run by the Swiss too, and still manages to have a one-way system whose complexity and incomprehensibility is unmatched by any other city I know. I think my favourite example is the traffic light where arrows pointing both straight ahead and to a left turn both say 'France'. Mad Hatters and March Hares inevitably come to mind.

We paused at home overnight on Tuesday, frantically unpacked and re-packed, and set off for Saturnia on Wednesday morning. The drive over the Appennines was wonderful despite the rain, and proved to Murray that some bits of Italy can be green too (because of the rain, obviously). Then we headed to the southern edge of Tuscany, where Saturnia is - and not, as you might have been led to believe, on another planet.

Among hills covered with olives, umbrella pines and cypresses, the unmistakeable smell of rotten eggs announced the presence of the healing spring. This was disconcerting at first, but it's amazing how quickly you get used to it, especially after you have dived into the pool right by the hotel and found that the water is at warm bath temperature. Bliss to tired necks and aching backs. Double bliss, because the high mineral content of the water makes it very easy to float in it while doing absolutely nothing apart from breathing and listening to the cicadas in the pine trees and the noise of the waterfalls.

The spa is both a medical establishment, doing serious treatment of problems with joints, muscles, skin conditions and even some respiratory problems, and a four-star hotel and beauty farm, offering all sorts of pampering to people who are prepared to pay the rather stiff prices. Sigh. They did massage and hot mud packs, and there's a special machine that massages you with jets of thermal water, and all sorts of facials and other beauty stuff, plus of course they sold a vast range of cosmetic products made with the wonder algae that grow in the sulphur pool. I did indulge in a shower massage and a mud pack for my back and neck, but really it would have been fine just enjoying the facilities outside.

Apart from the huge pool where the thermal water bubbled up from among the rocks at the bottom (you could see the bubbles streaming up if you looked into the water), there was an arrangement of artificial waterfalls where you could stand or sit and let the warm water massage whichever aching muscles you cared to position under it. There was a channel into which this water then flowed, and in which you could walk with and against the current, to exercise your leg muscles (it was surprisingly hard work) and stimulate the blood circulation; and there was a slightly cooler pool where one of the members of staff held daily aquagym sessions, which seemed like mere fun and proved surprisingly aerobic and tiring.

All around this was the garden, a huge lawn dotted with sun umbrellas and sunbeds (or, for the pale-skinned northeners among us, shade-beds) where the hotel guests and the spa clients could lounge around and relax all day - the spring actually belongs to the State, and therefore the spa is run as a concession, which means that it has to be open to the general public as well as to the hotel guests. We had a light salad lunch on the terrace restaurant, in the shade of the umbrella pines, but this didn't really make up for dinner in the evening, which was more than one could sensibly eat. Do people go to spas to put on weight, so that they have an excuse to go to a different one afterwards?

You can understand why I didn't really want to leave on the Friday morning... We managed to check out at the last possible minute, and be in the pool until about ten minutes before that, but I am considering asking political asylum in Saturnia.

We then drove to the small and obscure village called Castel di Tora, up in the Appennines east of Rome, by a rather picturesque lake on the border between Lazio and Abruzzi, where Marzia's parents own a share in a holiday home, and where this house had been commandeered by Marzia for a select gathering of gamers. I think there were 16 of us all told, which made the logistics of the thing interesting, but there was food enough for everybody, even considering the youthful and hungry age of some of the participants, and enough beds for everyone.

Many games were played in the course of the week-end, from a live fantasy investigation scenario, to a live Vampire game (surely, the proper term should be an undead Vampire game?) which started at half past eleven at night and in which, therefore, I declined to take part, claiming tiredness and decrepitude. Just as well, because it went on until about five the next morning... There was a Paranoia game, a fight with water guns just for the hell of it (I decided to be the official war photographer, you may see some of the pictures on the web page when Murray gets the time to scan them), some playtesting for Tragic (a narrative game using any cards you happen to have around), and an OnStage! scenario for Cluedo, in which I played Miss Scarlet (and I didn't kill anybody, anywhere, with anything. Though I did get three different people to reveal their terrible secrets [and revealed a terrible secret or two herself... great dress M.] ) and Murray played a pantomime-dame version of Mrs Peacock, to everyone's stunned admiration. All this was interspersed with much eating.

We got back home on Monday, and Murray bravely went back to work on Tuesday. Milan is currently warm, muggy and very easy to park in, because many people are on holiday. However, many shopkeepers are on holiday too, so finding fresh (non-supermarket) bread is proving to be an interesting challenge. I have already admitted defeat on the dry-cleaning front, as all the dry-cleaners that I know of in walking distance (and, believe me, there are many) have gone on holiday and won't be back until the 22nd. So my evening suit (I got glitter gel on the collar) is going to have to wait.

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to sell off any remaining summer stock, so there are many real sales (as opposed to the ones where prices seem to be cut by five thousand lire or some similar token amount) going on. That, plus the fact that the shops are usually air-conditioned, and the fact that one of the houses near us is being gutted, with all the noise that that entails, is a real encouragement to get out and spend money. After all, if Honeywell really does want Murray to go back to Bracknell soon, this is going to be the last chance I have of buying some nice clothes and shoes...

This covers all recent events, I think. Now I'd better start tidying up all the bits of paper from the Con, so that I can find all the other paperwork that's hiding among them. Life. Don't talk to me about life...

13^th August

It's time to let you know that we haven't vanished into a sunspot or anything.

We did see the eclipse, though it was only 90-something per cent here there was a brilliant clear sky and you could see the shadow of the moon gradually creeping across. We didn't get the total darkness and weird winds, but the sky did go the violet-bluish shade you sometimes see towards evening, and the temperature fell significantly. For this latter fact we were truly grateful, because it was 29 degrees in the house, and more outside.

Another pretty thing about the eclipse was that looking down onto the plum tree outside our living room windows, you could see the shadow it cast on the ground, and all the tiny spaces between the leaves, which I suppose are normally vaguely round, acted like hundreds of pinhole cameras, so you could see hundreds of crescent-shaped light images on the ground.

By that evening, a wind started piling up clouds, the kind that look like mountains of whipped cream, and by sunset they looked exactly like clouds in some of those very large Baroque paintings you see in Roman churches, but without the saints and angels. They were delightful shades of gold, apricot, peach and rose, beautifully outlined against a very deep blue sky, with the lower layers casting shadows on the upper because they were lit from below - which is logical, but still looked unusual. By the time it was dark, those clouds were invisible except when outlined by lightning, and then they looked spectacularly grey with complex scalloped edges outlined in silver. Again, the effect looked like something an artist would make up to impress the public. Those Baroque painters were much more accurate than I ever gave them credit for, obviously.

Anyway, as a result of two days of violent thunderstorms there have been a couple of closed Metro stations (water was getting in through the storm drains), a few accidents on the roads, a few rockfalls in the mountains, a few people dead or injured up there. We now have clear air, bright sunlight, a pleasant breeze and a very comfortable temperature. Also, a brand-new crop of mosquitoes breeding in the puddles left by the rain. Murray has large bright red bites to prove this!

Meanwhile, down in Sicily, many square kilometres of regional park near Cefalu' have burnt down, probably because some maniac decided it would be fun to set a few fires. These, combined with temperatures above forty degrees and a strong scirocco wind, made for a huge blaze. The local mayor said it will take approximately ten years for the vegetation to recover. Of course, it doesn't help that fire prevention is the responsibility of the town authorities, but fire fighting is the responsibility of the State, and somebody actually has to get two different bureaucrats to talk to each other in times of emergency...

A few local emergencies over here have led to this long silence: on the very day that Murray went to Bracknell, for example, I switched on the computer and it refused to boot. So I was stuck without mail until Murray got home, and he's struggling with the thing even as I write (I'm using the old computer), having uninstalled absolutely everything and threatened it with a very large axe. He is now in the process of re-installing things bit by bit (not literally, you understand), hoping that nothing is going to upset the thing again. I've just noticed that the "wait" message on his screen says "please sit back and relax while Windows 98 is installed on your computer", proving, once again, that Douglas Adams is a genius. If and when things are finally installed, this text will be cut-and-pasted across to the Compuserve program. Share and Enjoy!

So, while I had no mail to play with, I thought I'd start writing down the background for the Pinocchio scenario on this computer. The idea is to stun and amaze the ModCon players by e-mailing it to them and forcing them to create some characters for the game in advance. This is ground-breaking stuff, you understand. Anyway, the thunderstorms rather put paid to that idea for a while, because there was a flash of lightning, a huge burst of thunder, and the hard disk started making funny noises. Fortunately, I had saved the file about fifteen seconds earlier, but I decided to switch everything off and wait for Zeus to calm down a little bit.

Then, after Murray came back from Bracknell, his work computer started doing strange things too, and it took him a whole day to put things right... Do you think that eclipses are bad for computers? All computers, or just our computers?

Meanwhile, life continues in the deserted city - I probably told you all this last year, but then some of you weren't on the list last year, so if the rest have heard it all before, please bear with me. As if on some mysterious signal, the kind that tells salmon to swim up streams and swallows to fly south for the winter, about half the population of Milan packed up and queued at the motorway entrances last Friday, all intent on some mysterious holiday destinations. These destinations must now be very crowded indeed, because as you walk down the street you see mile upon mile of empty, legally parkable-on spaces, and you walk past many lowered shutters you see little signs that say "closed until 22nd August" or even longer. Suddenly, finding a bread shop that's open and in walking distance becomes a great achievement, and finding an open restaurant is a rare event. There are fewer trams around, but then they're all two-thirds empty, so I suppose that's justified. And everything is so quiet we could hear the crickets chirping (if that's the noise they're supposed to make) in next door's garden the other night.

Today I took advantage of the general quiet to go to the local police station to renew my passport. I didn't have to wait at all, and the police officer was rather surprised when, in reply to his questions (had I filled in the form? Had I paid the required ten thousand one hundred and fifty lire into the correct postal account, and did I have a receipt? Had I got the sixty thousand lire passport stamp? Did I have two recent passport photos?) I answered a consistent series of yes, and produced all the required bits of paper. He had no choice but to ask me to sign in the appropriate box, and then to stamp everything and send it off to the passport office. He told me the passport should be ready a week tomorrow. Feeling slightly dizzy from the speed of it all, I left, exhuding smugness.

As a sort of reward for feeling so happy I went to the Rinascente (that's the main department store by the Duomo, the one where various people who have been to visit us have bought rather nice suits), and I didn't have to fight anyone to get in, nor did I feel like killing anyone inside, because I was able to walk around quite happily and nobody bumped into me, even once! I tried on large numbers of swimsuits without having to queue for a changing room, and I even found a swimsuit that was designed for somebody my shape. From this you may deduce that the sales are on... There are many clothes of great delightfulness around at half price - it's just a shame that the fashion this year seems to be for everything to be floor-sweeping length. This is not sensible in the city, and anyway all those clothes look as if they were designed for somebody six inches taller than me, with all six of those inches in the legs! I suppose frustrated greed means a healthier bank balance.

So there you have it, an entirely frivolous account of what goes on when the Milanese are all away - oh, apart from the omnipresent builders. Because so many shops and businesses are shut, this is the ideal time to have them refurbished, you see, so our local chemist, pizzeria and one of the bars are all closed and being done up. Meanwhile, one of the buildings across the courtyard from us is being gutted, ready for a complete refit, much as happened in this building before we moved in, I suppose. There are phantom drills and thumps and crashes in every direction, to make up for the lack of traffic noise.

Some of you have remarked that I am beginning to talk about the possibility of going back to the UK. This is because Honeywell seem to have changed their mind about how vital Murray is to the company in Milan, and decided they really want people who can do what he does (whatever that is) back in Bracknell (Centre of the Universe, TM) instead. So that's where we may be going next. As to when that's going to be happening (if it happens), that's a good question. Next?

So you may guess that my personal uncertainty and insecurity factor is rising daily. Still, I've just finished putting back those two kilos I lost when we moved...

31^st August

On Sunday we braved the lightning, thunder and torrential rain and went to Belgioioso (south of Milan, not far from Pavia), which is a small and rather insignificant village in the middle of one of the main mosquito-manufacturing areas in the known universe, but which has a fifteenth century castle with seventeenth century additions, park, etc.

Apart from being interesting in itself, this place had been chosen as the venue for a big exhibition by lots of historical re-enactment societies, so we had the chance to wander round talking to lots of people and pick up lots of information.

There were armourers (complaining about the amount of paperwork it takes to get permission from a museum to examine original armour in order to reproduce it), with reproduction armour from the 6th century to the 15th, and weapons to match; there were societies which try to reproduce medieval and renaissance swordfighting techniques (they put on a few demonstrations, which were fun); there were archery societies explaining that they use synthetic bowstrings because an authentic linen bowstring sometimes costs more than the bow; and there were lots of people from the many Renaissance cities in the immediate and not so immediate neighbourhood, all advertising their local Palio, or a city fair, or a battle re-enactment, or guided visits to the Sforza and Gonzaga castles, and whatever else is going to happen over the next few months.

Among the many things we discovered is the fact that there is a flourishing costume industry, because each Palio requires appropriate costumes for hundreds of people. They may not all be to the high standard of authenticity achieved by Jane, but the sheer volume, seen at a distance, is very impressive. One of the very impressive things was the costume place that also does made to measure shoes in the fashion of whatever costume you require, from Roman to 1930s. They were not cheap, but then made to measure shoes never are. They even had chopines available in their catalogue. Anyone in the dance group interested in risking life and limb for the sake of authenticity, let me know. I have the address of the place.

One of the things that struck me the most was the fact that the armourers had an exact copy of a Landsknecht sword, a short stabbing weapon much like a gladius. Anyway, the hilt was too small for most men to hold comfortably, while it was the right size for my hands. Which leads us to deduce just how small the fearsome Landsknecht really were, compared to modern people.

Among the re-enactment groups were two sets of Templars and one set of Teutonic Knights, with proper mail and everything. Apparently a set of cheap plate costs close to 900 pounds, a set of good plate about 1500, and mail is more because it takes longer to make. How does that compare with the old C&S tables?

There was also a very wonderful lady who painted very wonderful plates with motifs copied from medieval architectural decorations; and some people who reproduced the same motifs on linen embroidery, the prices of which I did not dare ask.

When eventually it stopped raining, the archery displays started, followed by a variety of swordfights (including a very interesting demonstration of rapier and buckler and rapier and main-gauche fencing), by a few displays of flag-throwing, and finally by a quintain. Gorgeous horses, and the riders were pretty too. We took lots of pictures, which are now being developed and might, if they're any good and if Murray stays in this country long enough, eventually find their way onto the web page.

And, while nothing much was happening at lunchtime, we found a completely unprepossessing little trattoria where we ate delicious gnocchi with hare sauce followed by casserole of boar with a green salad, for an entirely reasonable price.

By the time we came home, laden with many leaflets and a couple of plates, we were ready to drop, and this we duly did.

Murray is currently in Bracknell, which, as far as I know, is not hosting any kind of costume extravaganza. Unless you count the local youth's imaginative style of dress as costume. Do you think that in 2650 the locals will organise historical re-enactments of the great 20th century social occasions, and all put on platform-soled trainers, stretch jeans and T-shirts to parade the streets?

6^th September

On Sunday we braved the lightning, thunder and torrential rain and went to Belgioioso (south of Milan, not far from Pavia), which is a small and rather insignificant village in the middle of one of the main mosquito-manufacturing areas in the known universe, but which has a fifteenth century castle with seventeenth century additions, park, etc.

Apart from being interesting in itself, this place had been chosen as the venue for a big exhibition by lots of historical re-enactment societies, so we had the chance to wander round talking to lots of people and pick up lots of information.

There were armourers (complaining about the amount of paperwork it takes to get permission from a museum to examine original armour in order to reproduce it), with reproduction armour from the 6th century to the 15th, and weapons to match; there were societies which try to reproduce medieval and renaissance swordfighting techniques (they put on a few demonstrations, which were fun); there were archery societies explaining that they use synthetic bowstrings because an authentic linen bowstring sometimes costs more than the bow; and there were lots of people from the many Renaissance cities in the immediate and not so immediate neighbourhood, all advertising their local Palio, or a city fair, or a battle re-enactment, or guided visits to the Sforza and Gonzaga castles, and whatever else is going to happen over the next few months.

Among the many things we discovered is the fact that there is a flourishing costume industry, because each Palio requires appropriate costumes for hundreds of people. They may not all be to the high standard of authenticity achieved by Jane, but the sheer volume, seen at a distance, is very impressive. One of the very impressive things was the costume place that also does made to measure shoes in the fashion of whatever costume you require, from Roman to 1930s. They were not cheap, but then made to measure shoes never are. They even had chopines available in their catalogue - for those among you who know little of Renaissance dance, chopines are the Renaissance version of platform shoes, and could be as high as eight inches or so. Anyone in the dance group interested in risking life and limb for the sake of authenticity, let me know. I have the address of the place.

One of the things that struck me the most was the fact that the armourers had an exact copy of a Landsknecht sword, a short stabbing weapon much like a gladius. Anyway, the hilt was too small for most men to hold comfortably, while it was the right size for my hands. Which leads us to deduce just how small the fearsome Landsknecht really were, compared to modern people.

Among the re-enactment groups were two sets of Templars and one set of Teutonic Knights, with proper mail and everything. Apparently a set of cheap plate costs close to 900 pounds, a set of good plate about 1500, and mail is more because it takes longer to make. How does that compare with the old C&S tables?

There was also a very wonderful lady who painted very wonderful plates with motifs copied from medieval architectural decorations; and some people who reproduced the same motifs on linen embroidery, the prices of which I did not dare ask.

When eventually it stopped raining, the archery displays started, followed by a variety of swordfights (including a very interesting demonstration of rapier and buckler and rapier and main-gauche fencing), by a few displays of flag-throwing, and finally by a quintain. Gorgeous horses, and the riders were pretty too. We took lots of pictures, which are now being developed and might, if they're any good and if Murray stays in this country long enough, eventually find their way onto the web page.

And, while nothing much was happening at lunchtime, we found a completely unprepossessing little trattoria where we ate delicious gnocchi with hare sauce followed by casserole of boar with a green salad, for an entirely reasonable price.

By the time we came home, laden with many leaflets and a couple of plates, we were ready to drop, and this we duly did.

Murray is currently in Bracknell, which, as far as I know, is not hosting any kind of costume extravaganza. Unless you count the local youth's imaginative style of dress as costume. Do you think that in 2650 the locals will organise historical re-enactments of the great 20th century social occasions, and all put on platform-soled trainers, stretch jeans and T-shirts to parade the streets?

6^th September

it wasn't easy to arrange, but we organised a daring escape from Milan last Friday (and we didn't even have to steal a motorbike or dig a tunnel) and drove down to San Gimignano, which is so picturesque, even among the many highly picturesque places in Tuscany, that it's been designated as a World Heritage Site.

As any self-respecting medieval town, it's built on the top of a fairly steep hill, surrounded by walls so that the locals can play Drop The Rock with any visitors they don't like, and crammed with art. Unlike a lot of other medieval towns, it went through a Great Depression of its very own when the bottom fell out of the saffron market in the early Renaissance (its most important export commodity was locally grown saffron). This, closely followed by a sweep of the Black Death that left it with 4000 inhabitants where before it had had 13000, meant that the local noble families didn't have the money to update their homes. The result is that it remained as a relative backwater, despite being quite close to Siena, and therefore it has a very high proportion of 12th and 13th century buildings, with some 14th, all relatively unmodified.

The biggest change is in the number of towers. There are seven towers remaining in the town (the medieval tower-house was a widespread form of dwelling, later abandoned, demolished, altered in favour of less secure but more comfortable houses), while at the height of San Gimignano's wealth there used to be seventy-two. I had trouble trying to work out where they might all fit, but so the guide book assures me; and it's true that there were many stone buildings among the brick houses, that suggested they might once have been taller.

Anyway, as you might imagine, something like that requires a lot of neck-craning and a lot of film, and also a lot of walking around trying to see everything, and trying to work out the best angles according to the light and the time of day. But that was just on Sunday.

We arrived on Friday night, and went to meet Adam and Julie (Mark Antony and Cordelia from the Shakespeare game; some of you might also remember Adam as Planchet in the Three Musketeers game), who were spending ten days on holiday in a nearby village. There followed a very Tuscan meal, involving large quantities of wild boar salame, rabbit cooked in Vernaccia (the local white wine), deer in plum sauce, and a cake with vanilla custard and pine kernels. Sigh.

We spent Saturday looking for Montalcino (the outskirts of Siena got in our way a bit, and tried to send us in the wrong direction, but we worked it out in the end), and, having found it and done the tourist thing of walking round the Medicean fortress and up and down the main street, we started looking for the famed Brunello.

For those among you who know as much about wine as I do about microchips, Brunello di Montalcino is one of the great wines of Italy, and probably of the world. It's red, strong, rich, complex and fabulously long-lived (if stored correctly, it will happily keep improving for twenty years, and often for much longer), all of which qualities also make it fabulously expensive.

We found an enoteca, were shown into the cellar rooms at the back where the tables were, and had a typical wine-tasting lunch, consisting of plates of mixed local ham, salame (including several different kinds of boar ham and salame) and local cheese, all accompanied by one Rosso and three Brunello - glasses, I hasten to add, not bottles. The prices for the glasses of wine were bad enough... The lunch was also typical in that you set out intending not to eat too much, and end up feeling that you've eaten half a boar each. But how can one leave such delicious stuff on the plate?

We then set out to look for some Brunello producers. Hampered only by the rain, the steepness of the hill, and the impenetrability of the one-way system (at least, it seemed pretty impenetrable after the glasses of Brunello), we failed utterly to work out where the producer we were looking for was, but we chanced upon the farmhouse of a different producer, who had actually got much better ratings for his wine in the '99 wine guide. After waiting for the American customers to leave (they had a local guide who runs a restaurant in the US. He was small, loud, exhuberant, wore little round glasses and spoke US English with an accent like Woody Allen's might be if Woody Allen had been a Tuscan immigrant) we actually tasted some of the Rosso, the Brunello, and the Brunello Riserva, and succumbed.

Feeling much poorer, but with nine bottles of excellent wine in the car, plus another six belonging to Adam and Julie, we returned to San Gimignano, cunningly dodged the outskirts of Siena, and after a little walk through the centre of town as dusk was falling (which was tantalising, because you could see things but not take any pictures), we finally settled on a place to eat. This was not easy, because there are about as many restaurants in San Gimignano as there are shops selling luxury goods to rich and/or foolish tourists.

So we ate in another cellar - the town is built on a hillside, so it seems to be the rule that if the door is at ground level, at least half of the ground floor will in fact be below ground level, not because the floor goes down, but because the ground rises. We all kept to a lighter sort of dish: roast vegetables, selections of pasta; Murray had an excellent salad with roast duck pieces in a balsamic vinegar dressing, I had some wonderful black truffle ravioli. We then undid all that virtuous effort by reading the dessert list.

On Sunday morning, Murray and I got into town early (our hotel was about a mile outside the walls, and had a stunning view of green Tuscan hills and early morning mist in the valleys) and visited the Medicean fortress (ruined, mostly, because Cosimo the younger decided he didn't want the San Gimignanesi to have a fortress they could use to keep him out, so he had it pulled down), from which we took many photos of towers and landscapes.

We also met the living proof that Germans can be cute if you catch them early enough: as we were climbing up the fortress steps, we met a very small, very blond, very pink-faced little boy who was following his father down the steps, holding on to the wall rather nervously and saying, very quietly and very hesitantly to himself, "Achtung... Achtung... Achtung..." All I can say is that the Force was strong in him. Those of you who were thinking of applying as Apprentice Sith Lord had better watch out, because judging from his Cuteness Rating, in a few years' time he's going to be very dangerous.

We continued our cultural wander through the town, finding surprises such as the Church of San Lorenzo, which my guide book claimed was closed for restoration and which was in fact open. It contained a rather splendid fresco of the Last Judgement, with seated saints in glory and a somewhat disturbing Hell full of torturer demons and lost souls.

We interrrupted all this culture by meeting Adam and Julie for lunch - yet another cellar, of course, but a whole different order of magnitude. Where the other restaurants did traditional Tuscan cooking, which is delicious but hearty, this one had researched recipes from the Renaissance, and it was delicious and refined. Caterina de'Medici's favourite dish, anyone?

Staggering out of the restaurant at half past three, we did manage to see the frescoes in Sant'Agostino (late 1400s) as well as the amazing late medieval frescoes in the Collegiata (not really a Cathedral, does Collegiate Church mean anything specific in English?), a series of Giotto-esque images of stories out of the Old and New Testaments, including another Last Judgement with many inventive tortures of the damned. There is a Museum of Torture in San Gimignano, for the less highbrow tourist, but I wonder why they bother, since they can see it all in glorious colour in the church. Anyway, we did much gazing at the various scenes (the vegetation in the Garden of Eden, the floppy-eared, stiff-trunked elephants, the partly-hidden camels, the short-necked giraffes going into the Ark, Joseph under a suspiciously plaid-like blanket dreaming of the sheaves of wheat are little things that stay in my mind) and at the captions explaining it all, which were in Italian rather than Latin. I found this extraordinary, being the only example I've come across so far. I shall have to investigate how widespread the use of Italian was in church art.

There was also a chapel with altar and frescoes from the 1470s, a lovely example of consistent Renaissance decoration, depicting the death and funeral of San Gimignano's own saint, Santa Fina, about whom I know nothing at all. Her funeral procession was painted in such loving detail that it wouldn't surprise me if the slightly unruly altar boys around her bier were portraits of actual San Gimignano children from the artist's time.

Contemporary artists abound in San Gimignano, ranging from the ones who make things obviously aimed at the tourist market to the ones whose aims are rather different. We frightened ourselves by seriously considering a watercolour by one of the second kind of artist, and we thoroughly stunned ourselves by buying it, thus doubling the cost of our weekend. It's very beautiful, and as soon as we've had a bank statement we'll see about having it framed... I don't know if that puts us into the category of rich tourists, or foolish tourists. Poorer in money, but richer in art might be a way of putting it.

That concluded our jaunt. We left, we found a way to avoid the massive traffic jams around Florence (avoid driving near Florence unless you have to), we got home without having to queue for ages at the motorway exit as we were dreading (yesterday was one of the dangerous dates for driving north, because nursery schools open this week, so a lot of people were returning from holiday), we unpacked, we went to sleep in our wonderful soft bed with many, many pillows.

And tonight we're invited round to Silvia and Fabio's to eat Florentine steak. Ludicrous.

21^st September

Latest news on our leisure activities: last Thursday night we drove to Sanico, and spent the night there so that Murray would be closer to Torino where he was working on Friday. While he was at work, I spent many cheerful hours removing spiderwebs full of dead mosquitoes from all available corners of the rooms - or at least from the ones I could see and reach. The house hasn't been lived in since July, when my parents went down to Sicily for the summer, so the wildlife has been having a rather unrestrained time. There was much spraying of insecticide to prevent the live mosquitoes from devouring us alive, and some sprinkling of rat poison in corners to catch the mouse.

There had been a mouse in the house back in March, when we stayed there with Guy and Simone. Then my parents went back and lived there for a while, and obviously nothing else got in. While the house was empty, though, another mouse found its way inside (we haven't worked out through where), and found my mother's supply of rice, which kept it very happy. It was a mouse with good taste, too, because it only went for the Arborio rice, not the ordinary stuff.

Anyway, a moderate amount of cleaning was required, as you can imagine, so despite the fact that the weather was lovely and I had intended to attack some of the more serpentine wisteria tendrils before they actually tripped somebody up, the only outdoor activities I had time for were picking the pears and the figs - at least, the ones I could get at, braving the wasps and the hornets.

Since Murray re-installed Windows on the computer, I have played Diablo a few times (and had nightmares about skeletons as a result!), and I can tell you that the adrenalin hit you get from facing half a dozen skeleton archers is as nothing compared to the real terror of crouching under the fig tree and hearing the approaching helicopter noise made by the resident hornets. However, all that key-pressing has not been for nothing: I am now very fast and very accurate with an insecticide spray, and I think, from the number of the monsters I hit, I've probably gone up a level, too.

The treasure, of course, was the figs... Much, much better than the ones you can buy, because I only picked the good ripe ones - at least, the ones I could reach. I think that picking the figs at the top would have had to be a team effort, with one person picking and another one standing guard with the insecticide.

On Saturday morning, we went to Bra (get those jokes out of your system now - I think the name actually comes from Braida, which is a medieval Latin word for pasture), which is near Alba, and which was hosting Cheese '99, a huge event sponsored by the Slow Food Association, which I have mentioned in these letters in the past. The whole town centre was taken over by a huge cheese market, with stalls where lots of producers of 'proper' cheese, i.e. non-industrial, traditional methods producers, were displaying and selling the stuff. There were people from all over Italy, and also some cheese stalls from France (of course), Spain, Portugal and even Ireland. I didn't see anything from the UK... but I may just have missed it. There were tasting kiosks where different tasting events were scheduled to take place throughout the weekend, there was a huge dining room where you could buy tickets for a meal involving a selection of cheeses and local wines, there was a place where you could taste different milk, flavoured yoghurt, ice cream...

The sad thing was that it rained pretty hard, so all the open air things were rather rushed and a bit stressful - the stalls had plastic awnings, of course, but the customers had to stand in the rain, which is not really conducive to relaxed tasting and shopping. Anyway, we managed to buy an impressive quantity of cheese, which we have now taken home with us and are enjoying with various salads.

We returned to Sanico in the afternoon, and met Marzia and Stefano, whom we had invited to see the Palio in Asti. So we went to Asti to find out what was going on, where and when.

The Palio in Asti is about as old as the one in Siena, only not nearly so famous, mostly because it was interrupted during the Fascist years. And because the square where they run it is not nearly as beautiful as the Piazza del Palio in Siena. In fact, originally the Asti race was run in a straight line, on a course outside the city walls, and it was only moved onto what is now Piazza del Palio in the 1700s - by which time I believe the city walls were almost entirely gone, anyway.

The city was appropriately decorated with all the banners for the quarters, and the stands were up in the square, but we found out that the tickets for the race were 50.000 lire (about 17 pounds), and Marzia and Stefano weren't that keen on spending that much, so we decided we would only come and watch the procession after lunch on Sunday.

We walked around a bit, showed them the Collegiata and the Cathedral, (I still have to work out what makes a church a Collegiata) both of them very fine churches; and then took them to Grazzano where we know a rather nice little restaurant, where of course we ate far too much - the crepe with cream cheese was the best of the series of antipasti, I think. The polenta with snails was surprisingly good (I have to steel myself to eat snails, probably because there are so many live examples in the garden in Sanico), the milk risotto was quite boring, the tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms were excellent, the quail was fantastic and the braised veal was delicious. The hazelnut cake was pretty good, but really needed to be thoroughly dampened with grappa to achieve its full potential.

On Sunday morning we chased round bits of Asti after assorted people in costume and flag-waving teams as each quarter paraded its horse through its streets. Then we headed for a strategic square near the Cathedral where the procession was supposed to file past, but unfortunately the weather got darker and more threatening, until it started raining in that matter-of-fact, insistent way that tells you it's going to carry on all day. We huddled under umbrellas (Murray was wearing his Dryzabone coat, so he was perfectly dry, and boasting about it), and watched a slightly curtailed procession - apparently the people with the best costumes, having spent vast sums of money on them, didn't want to spoil them for ever by trailing them through the rain, and I can't really blame them. Nevertheless, this shortened show still went on for over an hour, and we hope that some of the pictures came out.

Even with the diminished show, not all was lost: we found this amazing Sicilian patisserie just round the corner, where they made proper iris and cannoli (delights involving much sugar), and noted the address for future reference. If nothing else, I now have a reliable source of cannoli cases, so I took advantage of the fact and bought a few so that I can fill them with ricotta cream and we can have them for my birthday. Since there's no room for candles on cannoli, this seemed to me to be a sneaky way of hiding the answer...

Having returned to Sanico and had a warming cup of tea (with marron glace' and biscuits), we proceeded to drive home to Milan through an epic rainstorm. We found out later that all the surrounding area was placed on flood alert near the rivers. Fortunately, there were no accidents, which was a much more pressing worry at the time, and so we got home damp but safe.

Plans for this week include recovering, tidying up, playing Amber tomorrow night, possibly going out on Saturday night to write "Milano fa male" in the sky with torches, and then overdosing on sugar on Sunday.

6^th October

The last time I wrote to you about Asti in the rain, but lately it's been Milano in the sun. Not hot, of course, it's too late in the season for that, but very bright and clear, with pleasant breezes to sweep the air pollution away to some other poor unfortunates.

Over the past few days a few things made me think "oh, I must write that to people", of course I can't remember what those things were right now, but they might come back to me as I write.

We celebrated my birthday (thank you to all of you who wrote) by inviting my brothers, with their families, and also Marzia, Stefano and Silvia, in an attempt to overawe the children into behaving. It didn't work, of course... Not only did Martina and Giacomo rampage noisily round the place while Tommaso could only be pried away from the computer (X-Wing vs. Tie-fighter, I think) by the chocolate cake, but, to make it worse, Giacomo had a cold, which I promptly caught. The child is a veritable germ enhancing device.

We did discover, however, that Alessandro, who is not yet three, is a complete Star Wars freak as well as a serious Dougal groupie. He has seen the tapes (by the way, Anna and Giulia, yes, the tapes are still safe, do you want us to try and get them back for you?) more times than his parents could endure, and one of his favourite games is to get my brother to play the ice monster in Empire Strikes Back: he has to hold Alessandro upside down by his feet, and then tell him "Use the Force!" At that point Alessandro gets the light sabre and you all know how it goes from there.

So you see, madness does run in the family. It also shows the level of sophistication of the Star Wars films...

We went back to Sanico last week because Murray was working in Torino again, and I took advantage of the fine weather to hack some of the vegetation back, so you can now reach the door without being attacked by rose suckers and wisteria tendrils. The cat took advantage of my presence to demand some food... The rest of the wildlife was still buzzing threateningly around. The hornets had moved from the figs to the pears, so I had to wage a kind of guerrilla warfare to get under the tree to pick up what fruit was usable and throw away the rotten stuff before it encouraged more insect life. As a result, I have been cutting up kilos of pears in order to salvage the edible bits, and stewing them with honey, cinnamon and ginger.

Meanwhile, the persimmons are turning pale yellow. We await the deepening orange colour with much anticipation.

Back in the big city, I was walking past a ... and here I am suddenly stuck, as I realise that a 'profumeria' is another kind of shop that doesn't really exist in the UK. It sells not only perfumes, but all sorts of cosmetics and body care products, all the kind of things you might find in a chemists that are not actually medicinal, though the way some of the cosmetics companies are trying to sell their image, you could be forgiven for getting confused. Anyway, I was walking past the shop window, looking at a rather attractive display of pastel-coloured bottles, when the name of one of the products caught my eye. It was a body care range, I think, by a Japanese company, and it was called 'Sirky'. The meaning didn't register for a moment, and then it clicked. Does anyone remember the Mitsubishi 'Starrion'?

So why is it that a company that clearly has to spend a lot of money on research, testing, image-building, advertising, and whatever else sells cosmetics (or, for that matter, cars) , can't find the money for a very straightforward language consultancy?

More seriously, various depressing things have been happening in the political arena lately. One of them was the verdict for a murder trial, which was based partly on the testimony of a mafia ex-boss, and which implicated our ex-prime minister and Christian Democrat leader, Giulio Andreotti, as one of the people who supposedly ordered a hit man to murder a journalist about fifteen years ago. For some reason that, not being an expert in legal matters, I don't understand, the judge decided that the alleged murderer was not guilty, and all the alleged organisers were not guilty either. I think it was because the main witness was held to be unreliable, since he is himself a convicted murderer... Anyway, the Christian Democrats are jubilant, despite the fact that the party is not supposed to exist any more, and have been claiming that this verdict means that all the money and mafia scandals that came out in the Eighties never happened either.

The same Christian Democrats are pressing for an amnisty on Craxi, who was Prime Minister in the Eighties and who has absconded to Lybia in the company of a lot of money whose exact provenance the magistrates would dearly love to know. The excuse is that (a) he's rather ill, and (b) if we convict our ex-Prime Minister of dealings with organised crime, we'll be admitting to the world that for years our government was corrupt. My answer to (a) is that he can be tried while being looked after in hospital, and to (b) that if we try to pretend that corruption never happened, that will send a really reassuring message to the world, won't it?

As for that neo-Nazi guy in Austria... is it something in the water, do you think?

I heard about the train crash near Paddington. It sounded horrific. Worse still, it's the kind of transport accident that one has got used to hearing about, but not in the UK: the numbers of people dead and injured wouldn't be out of place in a report from India; which is bad enough, but at least there's the excuse of lack of money. So what does Great Western Railways have to say for itself?

Next weekend we're off to ModCon. The Rocky Horror character sheets are translated, though not yet printed. Much more time-consuming than the character sheets has been the work Murray's been doing on designing a T-shirt for the people who were at MarziaCon in August. We have finally settled on a Greek temple as background, with a scorpion and a tortoise in the foreground (because of events involving local wildlife and an ailing tortoise one of the guys was looking after), with the lettering down one side. You can see this masterpiece on the web page, where it appears in the 'plain' and 'full optional' version. The latter includes a picture of a Super Liquidator, and the legend, 'I survived!'. So over the past few days I've been frantically looking for 16 white T-shirts in M, L and XL sizes, which doesn't sound like much, but it isn't T-shirt season any more! Said T-shirts, once bought, had to be washed to remove any shiny residue from the material, and ironed so that the transfers would work properly. I haven't tried doing the actual transfer thing yet, because Murray has to print them out on the proper transfer paper. I'll let you know how the T-shirts are received.

Time for some porcini mushroom risotto, I think. Well, the guy in the market was trying to sell the last of the box, so he gave me a discount...

12^th October

Quality Control Warning: Murray wrote this. Not Emma. Low levels of Literary Content are to be expected. Wash in cold water only and use colour-fast detergents without brightening or whitening agents.

Oh no! Sorry. Quick segue into care of your new t-shirt with HP iron-on cool-peel inkjet transfers, sixteen of which were printed (the easy part by Murray) and ironed (the hard part by Emma) during Thursday and Friday morning for delivery to Martians at ModCon. Well! What else do you call them? They went to MarziaCon therefore they must be Marziani, which is Italian for Martian. Besides everyone knows that weird gamers are aliens from outer space...

The t-shirts were a great success, both the 'basic' and 'full optional' versions (HTTP://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/campobianco.com/MartiaCo.htm).

Emma will undoubtedly give you a much better account, including the scrummy 'sandwiches' available, but in both the Amber (DRPG) games she ran, 'Carissimo Pinocchio' and 'The Rocky Horror Chaos Show', I saw her players having a great, and very animated, time. In fact it wasn't just me. There was quite an audience for the Time Warp.

While Pinocchio was going on I sampled a game of 'Nephilim', a game of French origin with great atmosphere and great promise, but much too complicated to run at a con without preparing the players beforehand.

We both played in an Amber game with an excellent storyline and a nicely 'doomed world where lost hope can only be kindled by a band of brave heroes prepared to attempt the impossible' background. Alas it ran short of time when three of the players were called away to the final rounds of tournament games.

Sunday's 'Theatre of the Mind' 'tournament' (live or storytelling games) was great fun. It was a lovely mild sunny day and most people moved outdoors (except the Rocky Horror crowd. Probably the net stockings had something to do with it). On Stage! Amber worked very well culminating in a battle at the foot of Kolvir and a knife duel with Hamlet-esque overtones, noble sacrifices, long-lost brothers, treason, treachery, deceit and betrayal. You know, standard Amber fare.

Finally, following its opening in the provinces (playtest at MartiaCon), the live OnStage! version of the film Clue! complete with 30's costumes, sound-effects, sound-track, gramaphone, props and plastic-Oscar winning Director(Marzia), Actor (Mr. Green) and pantomine dame Mrs Peacock (yours truly, luvvies). Naturally we got back home about 1am after the two hour drive and a shameful stop at MacDonalds (well everything else within 50 yards was closed and we were too tired to taste anything). I was really glad I had planned a half day holiday this morning.

Now I know why it takes Emma so long to write her messages. It's already late again and I'm off to sleep.

12^th October

I'm just about calmed down after ModCon, so I can tell you all about it now, you poor passive audience, you.

Having spent last Thursday and part of Friday ironing many, many T-shirts twice (once to get the wrinkles out, once to actually do the transfer thing), I was not feeling exactly at my best on Friday afternoon when we set out. This meant I wasn't paying attention to the road, and that probably explains why we got so thoroughly lost once we reached Modena. Which is silly, because it's a small town, and we've been there three times already! But they do their best to make life interesting for the tourists by means of a very creative one-way system...

We did find our hotel at last, a concrete monstrosity overlooking the Carabinieri barracks. We had an excellent view of the whole site from our fifth floor window, and could easily have shot the sentries as they strolled around with their guns held in about the least warlike possible way, checking out the puddles for subversive mud. Our balcony was concrete too, so it would have provided perfect cover after shooting. Whoever said that roleplaying games make you violent?

After leaving our suitcase in the hotel, we went to find the Con proper, which was being held in the sports centre where the games club have their rooms. For the occasion, the club had rented the indoor courts, which were full of table-top armies, games stands, and milling gamers, in the best tradition of the Con genre. I was immensely flattered when I was recognised by the guy doing security at the door (he didn't have the big plastic sword this time), and immediately after that when I was hailed by half a dozen people in quick succession. Being a female gamer is a rare enough thing, being an Amber player in Italy is also rare, and being a female Amber GM in Italy makes me part of a very select group indeed. It may even be a group of one.

I spent Friday evening explaining Amber (three times! why don't novice players all turn up together instead of at fifteen minute intervals?), and sorting out characters for the Pinocchio game. Meanwhile, Murray haunted the games stands and talked to people. Friday evening was rounded off by meeting the Gygax creature (for non-gamers, Gary Gygax is, in a way, responsible for a lot of the weirdness you read about in these letters of mine, since he was one of the creators of the original Dungeons and Dragons game, which went on to spawn the whole gaming and role-playng phenomenon) and giving him a lift to the hotel, since it turned out we were staying in the same concrete carbuncle.

On Saturday morning, having completed the Quest for A Table to Play At (this involved finding the organisers, who told me to find Piffy, who sent somebody to get the keys to the club), we settled down to a session of complete madness, as my players got into the spirit of being Amberite children. I won't give too much detail, in case I decide to run the game again at ACUK 2000, and out of sympathy for non-gamers, who are putting up with another weird letter anyway.

We played outside for part of the time, because it was much warmer and more cheerful than the club premises. The garden also had a slide, a roundabout and swings, so the players did have a little break in character, and whizzed round madly...

From mid-afternoon, as Murray told you, we started another Amber game that was going very well, but which had to be abandoned when three of the people involved, including both GMs, had to go and play in the final of the Ars Magica tournament. I find this tournament stuff very difficult to understand. How can you win a roleplaying game? How can you have heats and a final? I am quite baffled, and disappointed when it interferes with something interesting.

However, having no game after dinner (more sandwiches from the bar - which was much better than it sounds, because the sandwiches included fillings as creative as grilled aubergines and smoked cheese, speck, tomato and mozzarella, spinach and ricotta...) meant that Murray and I got to do a bit of wandering around meeting people and socialising. And we even got to bed before midnight!

Sunday started by giving a lift to Gygax to the Con - we think our car should either

A) be fumigated

B) have a sticker saying "I am not responsible for the kind of people my owner decides to let in here".

The rest of Sunday was taken up with the Theatre of the Mind tournament - which apparently was only called a tournament as a sneaky ploy for getting lots of space all together - with several games running concurrently, and the people judged to be the best roleplayers going on to take the Cluedo roles in the final. There were two games of Tragic (with the masterful innovation of the egg-timer to stop storytellers going on too long each turn), one OnStage! version of Nine Princes in Amber, a detective story scenario, and the Rocky Horror Chaos Show, run by me.

The most difficult bit was deciding who had deserved the highest "mark" at the end. Completely silly. The players were even supposed to give a "mark" to their GM, so that we could work out an average, the idea being that the GM with the highest average would win the Best Director Oscar. This is even sillier, because I don't understand how you can compare GMing techniques in a scenario and a storytelling game, let alone comparing effort, creativity... Fortunately, this difficulty was bypassed in the end by the simple expedient of giving the Oscar to Marzia, who had organised the tournament as a whole.

After all the first lot of games were over, and a lot of marks were added up, averaged, lost, found, buried in soft peat for three months, etc., it was time for the "Clue!" game. Murray has told you the salient points. There were three alternative endings, as in the film, but two of them involved disposing of the CIA agent Mr Green so that he wouldn't report all the people who had been selling secrets. And as for who murdered whom, where and with what, that was all left very unexplained.

However, a good time was had by all, and we managed to get home, though we were quite shattered by then. Hence the McYuckies. And despite the fact that we were all very tired, I could taste the food, and I wish I hadn't... Do you think they breed the chickens for the McNuggets specially so they taste of Real McDonald's Cardboard (TM)? And, considering how late people stay out and how late people eat around here, it was depressing to find nothing else open within walking distance of the station.

Now, after the usual frenzy of washing, slightly delayed by the falling temperatures because things take that much longer to dry, we're getting ready to go to Florence on Thursday. We'll be meeting Robert and Jane, who have been there since Saturday. I expect we'll be frightfully cultured for a bit, and I may well rave at you. You have been warned.

18^th October

We're back from a hectic, cultural and enjoyable three days in Florence. We drove down last Thursday afternoon, managed to hit the Florence rush hour, which was no fun, but still succeeded in finding

a) our hotel, and

b) Rob and Jane

more or less at the time they were expecting us.

Our hotel turned out to be on one (modernised and refurbished) floor of a 12th century tower, and the culture just got more intense from then on. I'm still reeling from an overdose of masterpieces, so don't expect any sense out of me tonight. Be warned, however, that as soon as I recover some coherence you may get a serious rave.

Meanwhile, sneak preview: Florentine genius is not entirely vanished, it is well and abiding in the brain and creative spirit of whoever makes the ice cream in Rivoli. Rivoli is one of the oldest and most famous ice-cream places in Italy, apparently, but certainly the most famous in Florence, and they have, working for them, an unsung Great One, who has created - pause, fanfare of Baroque trumpets -

Persimmon ice-cream!

It was a delight so great it cannot be expressed in words. Why is there no sculptor of the calibre of Michelangelo around to immortalise this genius? The world needs a statue to preserve his/her features for ever.

21^st October

The culture high has subsided, coinciding perfectly in this with the wave of grey and rainy weather that is working its way through Italy, starting in the north-west where we've had the first snow of the year on the mountains (20 cm in Val d'Aosta, 40 cm in Val di Susa, the Great St. Bernard closed to lorries and snow chains on board obligatory for everyone else), working its way towards the extreme south-east where, as far as I know, it's merely cloudy and cool.

Milan has been grey and rainy since Tuesday, which has kept the graffiti writers from pouncing immediately on the newly-cleaned walls of the school opposite us, which two rather sad and bedraggled-looking council workers have spent the past two days cleaning with strangely smelling solvents and high-pressure water hoses. I don't know how long this newly achieved cleanness is going to last. Our Fearless Leader has apparently set aside six thousand million lire for cleaning graffiti off assorted city walls. It has since transpired that there are hundreds of council-owned buildings with rooves still made out of that ghastly concrete and asbestos mixture that was so beloved of builders thirty years ago, and which, under the action of time, frost and acid rain, is merrily releasing tiny particles of asbestos into the pure unsullied air we breathe. It seems that replacing asbestos rooves from schools is less of a priority than cleaning up the school walls.

Now that you are safe in the knowledge that I am still capable of ranting against the idiot politicians some of my idiot fellow-citizens decided to elect, I'll move on to the bit with many exclamation marks and superlatives.

The problem with Florence, if you can manage to reach the centre by braving the intricacies of the roadworks that surround it, and that have clearly been designed to protect it from invaders (probably the Sienese), is that it's full of foreigners. You dare not make a stupid remark out loud, because you know that there are hordes of English speakers of all nationalities all around you who would understand it. Of course, some of those English speakers, whose precise nationality I leave it to you to guess, are far too busy making stupid remarks of their own in very loud voices, so they probably wouldn't hear you. And I suppose that you could always try speaking Italian, if you wanted what you say to remain private. The stupidity of the remarks is prompted, I think, by the fact that you are surrounded by so many beautiful, historical, and important things that whatever you say is bound to sound rather trite and obvious. We spent the first evening walking around with Robert and Jane, who fortunately were past the nose-in-the-air stage, and could therefore help us walk without falling over.

Backtracking slightly, it turned out that the hotel we had booked was a rather small place on the first floor of a 12th century tower, which was stunning enough as a concept, except that the whole street dated from about the same time, give or take a century. And then it turned out that the hotel where Rob and Jane where staying, which was rather posher than ours, incorporated one of the oldest towers in Florence into its buildings.

To recover from the first shock of returning from the garage across the Ponte Vecchio (uncrowded, since the shops were shut, and with a lovely lamp-lit view of the river), we found a nearby restaurant and dined on mushrooms and casserole of boar, followed by the lovely Tuscan tradition of cantuccini with Vin Santo, which are rather crunchy almond biscuits soaked in a light, almost lemony sweet dessert wine.

We then went for a short walk to the Piazza dellla Signoria, which looks like all the pictures only better, to the Duomo, which is an extraordinary late Gothic-early Renaissance confection, with that amazing dome floating on the top, and back to our hotel via a short detour past the old Trattoria del Vecchio Fattore. That's a name that won't mean anything to anyone unless they're keen on Italian literature of the time between the wars, I'm afraid, but it was an amazing experience to be there, although the place is now swish and shiny, where in all the photos of the time it looked like a real working-class place. It's where people like Montale, Pratolini and their anti-Fascist friends used to meet up for their cheap dinners and long discussions about literature and poetry, and eventually those informal meetings developed into literary dinners and even spawned a prize. Even more important than that, for me personally, is the fact that my old friend Elio, who was born in Florence in 1899, used to go to that same restaurant from time to time, and happened to be there on some of the evenings when the future greats were having their talks. So I felt I had something of an indirect connection to the place.

Something similar goes for a luxurious bar and patisserie in Piazza della Signoria, a place called Rivoire, which I stared at for a long time simply because Elio had told me long tales of how he used to go there with his mother to buy the almond biscuits she would offer her friends when they came to call

21^st October

I had reached a moment in the letter about Florence when I was trying to organise what to say next in my head. I filed it in the 'Send Later' box, went off and took the washing out of the machine, then came back and, I confess, decided to indulge in a brief spot of Diablo. I had got down to the sixth level of the catacombs last time, you see, and reached a point where whichever door I opened next disclosed a large number of very ferocious monsters who instantly leapt out and killed me. Possibly the worst ones were some kind of acid-spitting things who lurked in a very large bunch behind a corner. I had managed to lure one out to chase me, and it had taken me several fireballs, many arrows and a quickly-gurgled potion of healing to survive just that one on its own. So I was rather wondering what kind of strategy to use to survive somewhere between six and ten of the nasties as I inserted the disc.

I don't know what I did then, but something about the sequence of key presses, or perhaps, as Murray said this evening, I just breathed out the wrong molecule of air, but something interfered with the screen definition on the computer, with the result that I was looking at a small section of what is normally on the screen, but much much larger, and I couldn't access all the remaining bits. I did try quitting, escaping, shutting down and starting up again, which as you all know are the computer illiterate's ways of trying to make something bad go away, but it didn't. And all my very large axes for threatening computers with were inside Diablo...

So I gave up until Murray came home. And while I was getting the food ready he fixed things (don't ask me how), and sent the mail, all unaware that there was a partly-written message in the file. Which is why the letter comes to a rather abrupt and greetings-less end, which as you know I would never do.

It's a bit late now to tell you all about the other things we did in Florence, so that'll have to wait until the next inexplicable episode.

2^nd November

The long gap in communications is due to the fact that I came down with some sort of stomach bug while Murray, having moved two armchairs without due care and attention, pulled some lower back muscles. We then spent some days feeling rather sorry for ourselves and each other, which is bound to cramp one's style. Murray went back to work today, though he was very careful how he picked up the portable, and I am eating real food again, so, if we knew what normality was, we might be as daring as to claim that it has been restored. But we don't, so we won't.

I hadn't finished telling you about Florence, and to be honest you might do better reading one of those modern guide books with lots of pictures. What I'll tell you that guide books might not are the odd things: for example, there is still car traffic allowed through one section of Piazza Duomo, which I found a shocking display of careless harm to art treasures. You can clearly see that the left side of the Duomo, the side along which one lane of traffic is still allowed, is noticeably grimier than the right side, which is pedestrian only; and if I can spot that, why can't the Florentines? But apparently when the city council tried to pedestrianise the area completely, all the shopkeepers around the square threatened to strike, claiming that stopping the traffic would damage trade. Strangely enough, none of the shopkeepers along the pedestrian-only Corso seem to be at all concerned by lack of trade, as the street always seems to be heaving with people.

At the same time as allowing this car-infested madness to continue, Florence also has some rather nifty little electric buses for going down the narrow, and otherwise exclusively pedestrian streets of the old centre. I was rather startled at first when I heard the noise of what I took to be a milk float behind me, to discover, as I flattened myself against the wall, that it was a bright yellow, 12-passenger bus. Excellent idea, since the centre of Florence lies in a bowl-shape near the river, so the more you can do to decrease the amount of pollution that lies in the bowl the better; and doubly excellent, because the narrow streets between stone houses are very effective noise-reverberating structures, and the least noise you make the better life is for everybody.

A footnote on what I was saying last time about all those ghastly English-speaking tourists: it means that when you approach a shopkeeper, a museum guard or any other member of Florentine humanity and you speak to them in fluent Italian with an accent no more foreign than that of Milan, they look upon you with greak kindness and fellow-feeling, and are inclined to grant you many requests that would normally meet with a "more than my job's worth, mate" kind of reply.

An example of this attitude occurred in our expedition to the Stibbert Museum, which is far from well-known and off the beaten track. This is understandable, because Stibbert was a 19th century collector, the museum is basically his private collections opened to the public in pretty much the state he left them, with all that that entails: pictures hung far too high up on the walls to be visible, masses of weapons in glass cases, mostly unlabelled or, when labelled, mostly unreadable, slightly random collections of 18th and 19th century Capodimonte and Wedgwood of no particular beauty - in itself, the museum is a museum piece, an example of what 19th century wealthy men collected and how they displayed it. However, the museum does house a vast collection of Renaissance weapons and armour in very fine condition (though pretty poor lighting), which is very interesting to anyone who might be involved with historical re-enactments or, of course, role-playing games, so we spent some time exhasperating our guide by peering at the minutiae of stirrups and sword belts and saddle cloths while she really wanted to drag us on to show us the ballroom and the portraits of the Stibbert family, about which we cared not a jot.

It also turned out that the museum owns quite a large collection of period clothes, none of which were on display at the time because there had been an exhibition of costumes a couple of months previously, and all the clothes had just been moved into a room to be sorted, cleaned if necessary, and stored properly. By talking excitedly (was it Fast Talk or Diplomacy?) about the catalogue to the exhibition, which Jane had bought, and by explaining at great lengths that Jane makes a living by making reproduction costumes and was particularly interested in seeing some of the things in the museum, we managed to persuade the guide to let us peer into the room where the clothes were - which of course she should not have done, and would probably get into a lot of trouble for if she were found out, so you won't tell anyone, will you? This meant that Jane could go and look at the clothes she was particularly interested in from a distance of about six inches, with no glass between her and them. It was a quick dash in and out while I kept the guide talking about how important all this was to Jane, but I think the result was worthwhile - as will anyone who might happen to order a reproduction of a particularly fine cream leather doublet.

Another thing worth remembering about Florence at present (and which applies to many other places as well) is that the place is fully in the grip of Jubilee fever, and therefore there is scaffolding and white (or occasionally green) plastic around many of the things that you would most want to see. The atmosphere in Santa Croce, for example, is not really enhanced by the noise of pneumatic drills, even though that means that you can happily talk about all the people whose names you recognise on the monuments all around the walls without fear of anyone telling you off for making an unseemly noise in church - the noise of drills being pretty much as unseemly as noise can get. The monuments around the walls are almost entirely ghastly, by the way, but the church is used in a way similar to Westminster Abbey for enshrining famous dead people, so you can walk around playing the game of how many of them you remember from what you had to learn at school.

Fortunately, the Cappella dei Pazzi, right next door, is unshrouded and lovely, a perfect example of mathematical harmony translated into grey stone and white plaster. What is more, there's an early example of astrological painting in the dome over the altar, where the ceiling depicts a precise moment in the Florence night sky - I can't tell you which one, because I haven't found the reference to it yet, and neither the guide book nor the explanatory notices in the chapel were any help.

Most of the plastic is gone from around Santa Maria Novella, but you can't visit the inside because there is restoration work going on. You can see the frescoes in the cloister and in the Spanish chapel (including the very unlikely-looking black and white dogs chasing away the equally unlikely heretical wolves who had been raiding the Christian flock - I don't think that painter had ever had much truck with wolves). You can also see the Medici chapels in San Lorenzo (where there's another astrologically-painted ceiling I wanted to see), but only if you get there before five o'clock, which I didn't. My father assures me that I have actually seen them from the inside, but I was obviously too young to pay any attention, because I don't remember anything about them.

As for the main museums, we only had the time to visit two, and both those visits were rushed and partial. In the Bargello (which means the Tax House) we saw the Bacchus and Brutus (breathtaking) by Michelangelo, and the Cellini bronzes (equally though differently so), while upstairs were a marble St. George and an early marble David by Donatello, plus of course his famous bronze David, the one with the hat. The floor with the Verrocchio sculptures, alas, was closed for lack of personnel. As for the Uffizi, it may not be a large museum compared to the National Gallery, let alone the Louvre, but it does hold a fearsome concentration of masterpieces, and it left me staggered for several days afterwards. You can undoubtedly do without a long list of titles of pictures, which would be pretty meaningless. I could easily have spent the whole evening (being such a small place, the Uffizi has had to restrict the numbers of people who can be inside at any one time, so in order to cope with the demand it stays open until eleven at night) in the Botticelli room alone.

Many things have happened since the Florence trip, but they are all firmly in the realm of everyday events: my parents have come back from Sicily and found that the house in Sanico (well, the boiler room, at least) had become a paradise for mice, who had gnawed through some old plaster round the pipes and settled among the nice soft cardboard boxes and the picnic basket, feeding on best rice (I had put the rice in the cupboard, but this did not stop them) and generally having a good time. After much putting down of poison and polyfilla-ing of holes, it seems that the room is currently mouse-free. We shall have to see if it lasts.

My nephew Alessandro frightened us all to bits by getting a rather nasty eye infection (he was moaning "Ale can't see! Ale can't see!" which was terrifying) but is now fine; his parents, having taken him to the hospital and then spent several days there, both caught some kind of stray bug, and are about recovered; Murray and I got ill and recovered; Hallowe'en came and went, with a live Vampire game to which we were invited but to which neither of us felt up to going.

Everything else is mostly quiet. The weather has been pretty good until a couple of days ago, sunny and clear and warm enough to walk around in a light jacket; it's now turned grey and damp, cool in the mornings and at night, but still oddly warm during the day. The local weather forecasters claim temperatures are going to rise, which is strange.

Fortunately, it started to rain, which gradually forced all the particulates down to the ground and into the drains, where no doubt the cocktail of heavy metals and other interesting compounds is having a wonderful effect on the development of our local mythical mutants. The traffic ban was lifted - not that there was any noticeable difference during the ban - and life is back to normal for the four-wheel-dependant.

It may be because there's a lot less rain down in Naples that the city, after early protests, is now settled and even happy in the acceptance of a complete ban on private car use every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Surely it couldn't be due to the mayor's political views, could it?

17^th November

I don't think I have any particularly illuminating episodes to tell you about this time, but it's been a long time since I last wrote, and I ought to let you know that life goes on.

Talking of illuminating, the Dalai Lama was in Milan about ten days ago, and for the occasion a surprisingly large number of rich and famous people, and of politicians whose only faith is in the One True Market, discovered a sudden interest in Tibetan culture and in spiritual as opposed to material wealth. Our Fearless Leader, Albertini, was one of them, and promptly made a fool of himself by comparing the actions of the occupying Chinese forces in Tibet with the ideas of the Italian Left (what's left of it) who are currently opposing a proposed move by the ex-Christian Democrats, supported by the League, Forza Italia and the Vatican, to give state funds to private Catholic schools. I think he was trying to draw some kind of comparison between the forcible destruction of a religious culture, and the refusal to fund religious education out of already scarce state funds. I don't know how much of all that was followed by the Dalai Lama.

Meanwhile, the corner of old Milan we could see from our living room windows is being torn down, with much roaring of machinery and crashing of walls, because the site is being redeveloped: it's going to become the garages for the building across the courtyard from us, which is currently being gutted and will then be completely restored. Apart from the fact that it occasionally sounds as if our walls are the ones being torn down, this is not in itself a bad thing, because at least all the old roofs will have to be taken away and disposed of, and since they're made of that corrugated concrete-asbestos mix that was so popular for warehouses thirty years ago, the sooner they go the better for everyone. I just hope they do the removal and disposal properly. I don't expect the garages that will replace the old buildings will be things of beauty, but then neither are the things that are standing there at the moment. I am only concerned for the bats, which I used to see flying around at dusk over the courtyard. I have no idea if they had nests in the old buildings, but it does seem likely, and I don't know whether they'll be able to find replacement accommodation.

The utility companies in Milan seem to have woken up to the idea of the Millennium Bug (even if they pronounce it Millennium Bag, or, in extreme cases, Millennium Beg), which, since there are only 45 days to go, is not entirely comforting. Actually, the Gas and Electricity companies have announced that they think they've got all their systems sorted out, and that they've made arrangements with each other that, should one of them have a black-out, the other one would supply power to all the priority users, such as the water company, the hospitals and the emergency services. The spokespeople sounded rather disappointed that there wasn't more attention being paid by private citizens, but really, what do they expect us to do about it? It's not as if we could prevent malfunctions in our gas or water system by worrying about it. As Murray can testify, I have frequently been Runner-Up in the World Championships for Worriers, Fretters and Related Agitated Persons, and it's never stopped a dripping tap...

However, it does seem increasingly likely that Murray will have to spend New Year's Eve in the office (since some of his colleagues have to) in case of emergency, so I was thinking that I should probably do the same. Any bright ideas for impromptu office parties when it turns out that nothing goes wrong?

Back to the Millennium Bag: before anyone else has a chance to, I'd like to nominate Mrs. Thatcher. Feel free to suggest your own favourites. The Millennium Beg is a bit more difficult, though. Any ideas?

End of the world fever and Armageddon-watching really ought to be close to peaking by now, but I haven't noticed many references, despite the continuing catalogue of wars, earthquakes, floods and other disasters of the man-made or geographical variety. Is it simply that we have noticed no difference from any other year?

The weather, since we're talking of geographical disasters, is cold and wet, with snow on the mountains, which is good for mad skiers who are getting ready for their first weekend of the season, but bad for the south of France, where some of the aforementioned floods were. The rain in town has saved us from reaching alarm levels in particulates - again. I don't think the message is getting through.

Murray is in Amsterdam, for the first time in many months, actually. He went from Malpensa because almost all flights have moved there from Linate now, and this is inconvenient because it takes him more than twice as long to reach the airport. What is more, I heard today that of all international European airports, only Barcelona consistently has a higher percentage than Malpensa of flights that are late. This is not an encouraging statistic.

Good news: I went out shopping with my parents the other morning, which was enjoyable and calmed my father down.

Bad news: my father needs calming down because he's getting very nervous waiting for the results of my mother's tests. She's been rather hoarse since the summer, and the doctor decided it would be best to check her vocal chords.

Good news: the tests went ahead without any complications, and despite the total anaesthetic my mother feels fine.

Bad news: the results are due tomorrow, my father's worry levels are reaching the stratosphere, and my mother's voice is almost completely gone - having had strange medical instruments down her throat, this is not entirely surprising.

Good news: my mother is very relaxed about the whole thing.

Bad news: a lot of other relatives are not, and keep phoning up asking for news, which we can't give them until tomorrow, when we'll finally know something for certain. Meanwhile, my mother, being almost voiceless, can't answer the phone, and my father is being driven up the wall by all the questions.

Good news: he seemed cheered up by my visit yesterday.

Bad news: on the way home from that visit, my wallet disappeared. This meant not only the cash I was carrying, but also my bank and credit cards, my ID card and my driving license.

Good news: since I noticed almost immediately, I was able to phone the credit card company and the bank to have my lost cards stopped.

Bad news: the bank insisted I should go to the police to make a formal statement of loss or theft, especially since my ID documents had gone.

Good news: the police station is only a couple of hundred yards away, the policeman on duty was very efficient, and everything was sorted out within a few minutes.

Bad news: I was very shaken and depressed by the whole thing.

Good news: when Murray got home, he moved an armchair (despite the danger this involves - My Hero!), and, lo and behold, there was my wallet. It must have fallen under the chair even before I went out that morning, and had been there all the time.

Bad news: I had to go back to the police station this morning to tell them what had actually happened...

Good news: the policeman seemed more amused than anything else, and apart from me feeling extremely stupid for having gone into a panic, everything was fine.

Bad news: the bank has already stopped my cards, so I have to wait for them to send me new ones.

I hope my strange ramblings made some sort of sense, even months after the events.

The latest news is mixed: my mother's trouble with her throat turned out to be cancer on one of the vocal cords, and she has since been to hospital, had the vocal cord removed, and is back home, looking rather thin and pale and sounding pretty voiceless. She went to her GP today, and he says her throat is healing and she'll get most of her voice back gradually. She is booked to see the specialist again in early January to make sure that everything is clear, so until then we'll all be a bit anxious, I expect…

Because of this, preparations for Christmas this year have been rather delayed: I haven't even got the ricotta to make cassata yet, but I couldn't face the thought until my mother was home.

Murray is working as hard as normal, or possibly harder, as all the Year 2000 projects have to be finished in time. It really does look as if we'll be spending New Year's Eve in the office!

I hope you have a wonderful time over the holidays - no long weekends here, of course, since the custom of adding a working day's holiday if Christmas falls on a weekend is unheard of outside the UK!