Recently in Travel Category

            The one day international between England and Australia at Lord's was probably top. The cricket is slightly incidental though anything involving those two sides is always good even with pyjamas, a relative failure by Ponting, the wrong result and overly cautious captaincy by Strauss. (I'd have brought on Broad and Swann much earlier!) And the only familiar face was the general in the champagne bar of the Tennis Court which was deeply wonderful but more would have been better still. We were also very conscious of the wedding cricket at Worcester College, Oxford, which turned out to be stylish and enjoyable and blessed with good weather when we had supper at Quod in Oxford with Rick and Judi the following evening. It seemed bizarre that only a month earlier we had been at the crime writer's conference in Oklahoma City before jetting eventfully to Chicago where, incidentally, I see that the sinister policeman and alleged torturer whose trial I attended has been found guilty and is to be sentenced in November when he could face as long as 45 years in prison. As he's not well and in his sixties it seems unlikely that he will ever come out which is probably right and proper. Bit late in the day but reassuring in a way.

            Anyway it seems extraordinary to be back in the United Kingdom dealing with everyday problems after a period of exoticism - not, I hasten to add, a holiday. To apply the chronological approach which is more logical and sensible we began June in Oklahoma City which was fascinating. We had a few days on our own before the conference began and, as usual were struck by the money, the space and the difference as well as the similarity. There is a well-established belief that we are, as Churchill (?) said, united and yet divided by a common tongue. This is true but it's a common yet different culture as well. The university which was at the centre of our exchanges was modeled on Oxford and Cambridge and yet, although there are similarities it is the differences that strike one. There is a reading room which is obviously derived from the Bodleian or something but it is ten times as big, ten times cleaner and empty. The University has the best, well most expensive, private art collection ever given to a university in the USA. Gaylord College which is endowed by a man called Gaylord is, I think, the journalism faculty and yet it has a state of the art newsroom we can only dream of in England. The sofas and armchairs are of a leatheriness, depth, comfort and, yes, emptiness, that we can only dream of. Gaylord's main claim to fame seems to be that he or the family own the Oklahoman. I can't imagine a similar endowment on the back of say the Western Morning News and while I am sure that the Oklahoman is at the cutting edge of modern journalism I can't help thinking...

            Oh what? It's certainly different though. In some respects  it is the similarity with what we know which is striking. Thus the best thing to come out of the conference for me, personally, is being commissioned to write a short story for a German language anthology to be published for next year's conference in Zurich. I have already begun it, urged on by the energetic and indefatigable Dr. Jutta Motz, who was of our number in Oklahoma. 

            The best things at conferences A LWAYS happen in the interstices,; over the breakfast table, in the corridors but seldom on stage. There were exceptions, of course. I loved the lecture by a former Dean of Journalism, an ex White House correspondent called David Dary, one of whose books I have since acquired from Bookends of Fowey, which is generally unobtainable on this side of the Atlantic and is called Cowboy Culture. It's very good indeed - rigorous, readable and about a subject on which we are parochially ignorant.

            Despite this and such incidental public pleasures as a man and a dog describing policework among the Indians and a baseball game between the Oklahoma team and their Memphis counterpart it was moments of natter and chatter with the likes of Jutta which were most memorable. It is ever thus.

            Don't incidentally fly all over the States. Americans do and they always tell you that the train and the bus don't operate but Greyhound and Amtrak still exist and while we were told by all and sundry that they are dangerous, unpunctual or had simply passed on we used both  and were well satisfied. I suppose a failure to tell the baggage handlers that our departure gate had changed, the nail through the tire and the failure to find the only man allowed to change said tire were par for the course. The emergency landing in North West Arkansas because a nearby passenger had thrown a fit was bad luck (a lot worse for him than for us) but I'd still pass on planes and stick to buses and trains - even in the States. Maybe it is a risk but you see a lot more and we enjoyed them. Flying involves wandering around without a jacket or shoes and is a pain.

            Anyway we ended up for a couple of days in Chicago which seemed like the centre of the universe and was amazingly cool after the extreme heat of the old south and then headed home getting  into Heathrow early in the morning sleepless and having watched a surfeit of. Still, we made it, so thank-you Virgin and the volcano in Iceland.

            Once home we spent a night with friends just outside Salisbury and then stopped off in Sherborne for lunch with friends and a night with the headmaster who I like to count as a friend too. Simon is retiring and he and his wife, Olivia, are moving to Bath. One of his final acts however is to commission me to write a new history of the school. I am going to enjoy this. They have found someone who shared a study with Alan Turiung, Simon has all the relevant papers involving the doomed reign of a distinguished predecessor, there are some old masters to interview, the manuscript of Alec Waugh's Loom of Youth to consult and much else besides.   

            I have a marginal quandary about Sherborne because when I was a boy there in the fifties and sixties I was a serious rebel, helped to start an allegedly subversive national magazine, disliked many activities such as compulsory boxing and the Combined Cadet Force. Since then, however, the school has changed in some ways quite dramatically. In any case, like so many institutions, there was stuff I disliked but other things such as the quality of some of the teaching and the beauty and history of the place which I enjoyed and still do. I disapprove of the basic notion of fee-paying education but I don't see why people should be discriminated against just because they have rich parents besides which I am attracted by the notions of my late (and great) English teacher there, John Buchanan, who said there were only two sorts of school, good and bad and presumably I wished to make them all better. I'm not sure I agree but I see what he meant.

            In any case I think I'm probably the best person for the job and I will enjoy it. I don't think that means I have "sold out" or betrayed my original beliefs. Not everyone will agree but I think Sherborne, for better or worse, is part of me. After all I spent five years there and I can't deny it.. Not everyone will agree but there you go! If I do nothing else I shall work in an approving mention of the world's greatest biscuit: the Dorset Knob. Let's hear it for Dorset Knobs everywhere.

 

            So home at last . Bank manager, a Cornish pasty lunch plus crime fiction at the local library, alfresco lunch in a friend's beautiful garden. Rugby (better than usual from a crummy England), World Cup Soccer (abysmal from another crummy England), Wimbledon Tennis (not even a crummy England but a half decent if surly Scot) all available on terrestrial TV and the only half-decent "England" is cricket which you can only get (like rugby come to think of it) on Murdoch's Sky and which relies heavily on the South Africans and Irish. Maybe the English should abandon any attempt at playing top-whack sport. Foreigners do it so much better.

 

            Anyway back to earth with a vengeance and at the end of the month off to see my aged Mama (she will be 90 next birthday). It's normally four hours from our local station, Par, to Tisbury, hers. On this day, however, there had been a derailment so my train was nonchalantly cancelled; I was an hour late and almost missed the butcher. On Tuesday, after among other excitements, a merry session with Bishop Bickersteth (who claims to be the only Bishop to have gone shooting with Prince Philip at Sandringham), I travelled on to London (the normally trusty taxi failed to show but luckily Dave who is even trustier came to the rescue and I caught my scheduled train  before embarking on the usual hectic London schedule involving lunch with friends, supper with my younger son, Tristram, a visit to Buckingham Palace (no that was the day after), another to Sally Soames' terrific exhibition of photos including one of Clement Attlee for which I did the interview, maps at the British Library, a chat with a former royal policy chief, breakfast with an old friend and favourite editor who was put out and late because his bath overflowed and so to bed at the Frontline Club.

           

            That was the month, that was. Busy, busy; a bit of a roller-coaster. Such, I think is life. A matter of hanging in sometimes by one's finger tips. It can be frustrating; often fascinating; sometimes fun. But it IS, like it or not and another month has passed. It's foggy outside and I can't even see Polruan. The Dutch are in the final of the world cup. I've almost finished reading the history of New Zealand. A literary friend of friends has just rung to say she has moved in to Bodinnick.  Must rush, more next time...

            Lucy's wedding was the high spot of the month; an informal affair in a garden with a view overlooking the Matakana coastline in New Zealand, presided over by a Kiwi celebrant called Sykes (female), followed by speeches and supper and skyped home to the bride's brother in a frosty West London. I spoke, before supper, and tried to be mildly embarrassing for the last time, recalling the occasion that Lucy had been confronted by her brother, now a teacher at St. Benedict's, and asked to remove the pin from his nose which he had inserted with huge sartorial enthusiasm a few hours previously.He had since repented of this but could not remove it unaided. Lucy did the trick.         

            Penny and I flew to Auckland from Brisbane on New Year's Day and have spent the entire month in New Zealand. Australians, including my dear wife, tend to be odd about New Zealanders and New Zealand; the British less so. It is incredibly beautiful and on the whole attractively empty. I am becoming slightly bored with people telling me that the top of the north island is as far from the bottom of the south as Canada from Mexico but when you remember that the country only has just over four million inhabitants roughly a third of whom are in or around Auckland it makes one think. It is also almost ludicrously benign - devoid of the  killer crocs, lethal spiders, dodgy dingoes and above all the crippling drought which make Australia slightly problematic. Australians tend to be patronizing about Kiwis and the funny way they talk. To a Brit , however, they don't talk any funnier than the Australians (of whom I am incidentally very fond - he says patronisingly . After all I married one) Nevertheless Australian attitudes to its smaller neighbour across the Tasman seem similar and no more justified than Spanish condescension towards Portugal or American to Canada. It's just big brother syndrome.

            Anyway I like it here and people - including some transplanted Brits and Australians - couldn't have been kinder and friendlier. I have written lots of the latest novel ("Death in the opening Chapter"), a successful piece for the Lady about the visit of Prince William and another piece about the wines and other attractions of the Matakana country for Country Life. On Saturday we are going to drive over to Wally's (Wally is a lost Australian bird called a galah - a sort of noisy budgerigar) on the Wharf at Whakatane for fish and chips (fush and chups in the vernacular) and maybe on Sunday we hope to go to an amazing sounding estate nearby for clay pigeon shooting. Depends on our new friend Virginia. I have the use of a lovely old Land Rover from Yeovil but Penny doesn't like my driving and keeps complaining that it is very wide and the roads very narrow. We didn't hit anything on the way to and from Rotorua the other day and the Land Rover reminds me of driving Cecil round North Africa with Martin and Bill many years ago. Unfortunately I told Penny about the time I almost backed Cecil over the side of the Rock of Gibraltar and she holds it against me. Silly me. I should know better. And maybe have known better in 1963 on Gibraltar.

             Last night we had a scary electric storm but generally the views of Lake Tarawera are spectacular and everything grows and flourishes.No wonder Cook christened this area the Bay of Plenty. I had a birthday on the 28^th and am feeling incredibly old. The spuds, though, came from the garden. As did the leeks and carrots.

 

            I shouldn't be here, of course. There is a school of thought which says I should be back in the UK, suffering, but ...All my life I have taken a modicum of risk but this doesn't necessarily win friends. For instance Alison and I often took the children abroad, most dramatically to Toronto and to Santa Fe, New Mexico. On both occasions I was warned that to spend a year away from home would severely interfere with their education, would be generally disruptive and contrary to decency and common sense. On our return after, on both occasions, a thoroughly enjoyable and productive time away (I think) I was told by a number of people that it was "different for you". Quite how was never very satisfactorily explained. Maybe it runs in the family. My father who, in my opinion, erred slightly on the risky side of life, was, as a young man in World War Two sent to Naples to get hold of lifejackets for the members of his battalion to wear on the perilous crossing of the River Garigliano. Bye-passing the usual channels he went directly to the Royal Navy and was given the requisite number of Mae Wests which were otherwise surplus to requirements. He returned to the line with his trophies, the men crossed the Garigliano without anyone drowning, and my father obviously thought he had done good. Not a bit of it. There were regulations to cover that sort of thing and any number of jobsworths to complain about that shocker Heald who had broken them. No matter that lives were saved. My father had broken the rules and used his initiative. Bad show.

            I know I am going to get flak for applauding this and saying that, to a certain extent and within obvious limitations, one has to ignore rules, other people and even what passes for common sense, but I nevertheless believe it quite passionately. It may end in tears but it's important to be able to say, in the words of the Sinatra song, that you did it your way.

            So here I sit on the shores of Lake Tarawera tapping away at a crime novel set in an English Literary Festival. I have no agent, no publisher and quite possibly no audience. Tant pis. I shall revolve in, well I won't be able to revolve, since I have every intention of being cremated but if the book is published posthumously and becomes a huge success I shall be jolly cross. However we shall see. I like it. In fact I know it's rather good but unfortunately that won't make any difference. Good books don't get published; bad books do; good books remain unread; bad ones become best-sellers. Fact of life. And proper writing is a disease which afflicts proper writers. We can't stop. Some of us end up revered, award-winning and prosperous. Others don't. It doesn't, alas, have an awful lot to do with talent or hard work and I don't think one has any alternative but to plug away. Pity about the people who get in the way but don't, please, think that any commercial failure is the result of indolence or lack of foresight.

            I see that the Grim Reaper continues to scythe away. He got Michael Mavor, ex headmaster of Loretto, Gordonstoun and  Rugby aged only sixty two on holiday in Peru and he reeled in Geoffrey Van Hay who used to be a suave, pin-stripe trousered presence behind the bar at El Vino in London. Not to mention the mother of our hostess in New Zealand who was in her nineties but even so...

            And even when it isn't the finality of a death sentence there are other evidences of passing years. Our latest consignment of mail included an invitation to the farewell party of a friend who had been at the same publishers for forty years. I remember him as a young man when we both  had everything before us. Now we are members of the old guard about whom we used to giggle forty years ago. Incidentally I recall a military friend of mine writing a rather good biography. When I remarked, rudely, that I didn't know that he could write English he answered that our friend was his editor. This explained the excellence of his prose. My Army friend then looked thoughtful and said that in the military his editor would have been a first-rate fighting man. Unfortunately all soldiers were dogged by a body called HQ Company. It was his philosophy to pare HQ to an absolute minimum but he had noticed that in publishing HQ company was ginormous and fighting men thin on the ground. "I wonder what they all do", he mused contemplating the dead wood at the heart of the ailing business. Life is dogged by huge HQ companies.

 

            I remember once speaking at a writers' conference and the evening before I was due on a highly successful and famous author spoke. I thought he was entertaining and instructive but my friends, mostly unpublished and struggling, were furious and unimpressed. "He made it seem so easy", they chorused. I don't think that's what he meant. He was just trying to emphasise the fact that he had been lucky and good fortune can strike anyone. (Likewise bad). But my new friends didn't agree. They thought he had failed to suggest that it was amazingly hard work. So, I would venture to suggest (and was very careful to say next morning!) it is.

 

            I don't for a moment deny my good luck. It's been phenomenal and as I sit typing this and looking out across sunny lawns and shrubs to the lake beyond I count my blessings. But I wouldn't claim that it's easy. My experience is that if you don't work you don't get. And even if you do work you don't necessarily get. On reflection that's wrong too. One of the sad and depressing things about life is that many of those who reap the greatest rewards - financial anyway - seem not to do a hand's turn. But I don't see the satisfaction of a life spent in HQ company.

            On the other hand there is a school of thought that says that confronted with problems and adversity you pull in your horns, hunker down and do as little as possible. That's a parody but not far from the truth and it's emphatically not my style. Confronted with adversity one has two alternatives. One is to go into your shell and give up; the other is to come out swinging. As the late Randolph Churchill said when things are bad you put on your best overcoat, get hold of the most expensive cigar you can, and walk up and down Piccadilly smiling broadly.

            I am of the Churchillian persuasion which is, I think, why I am in New Zealand enjoying the sunshine and working very hard rather than shivering in the cold back home and doing nothing. Not everyone thinks this desirable or right, but it's the way I am. It's in the genes. I protest too much.

            That said, I have, I think, arrived at a policy of "reasonable expectation" which sums up my beliefs and actually everyone else's in a sense, if you see what I mean which you probably don't. "Most people" are in salaried employment and "reasonable expectation" means that they can expect to be so for the foreseeable future (another interesting concept). This means that they can plan and budget accordingly. Those relatively few of us who are not in salaried employment have also to rely on "reasonable expectation" but we don't enjoy a regular salary and all we have to go on is past performance. In my case, I think, it was reasonable to expect that I would go on having fiction and non-fiction books published, sometimes serialized, and that this together with more or less regular income from journalism would correspond to a reasonable salary.

            Maybe I should have foreseen a collapse of all this more or less completely and more or less simultaneously. Unfortunately I didn't. Add in the unexpected death of my younger brother and a semi-debilitating stroke for my mother and you have a pretty bad case scenario which runs, I think, counter to "reasonable expectation".

            The question now is how do I deal with this? My answer is to fight one's corner. I can't change personal disasters but I can strive to get myself back track.

            A case in point though. Next June there is an international crime writers; conference in Oklahoma City. I would like to go. I contacted the English Speaking Union in New York about it and have as a result been asked to undertake a speaking tour of their branches in the American south-east. They don't pay but they will look after myself and my wife once we get ourselves to Savannah, Georgia. En route I would like to call in on my daughter Emma and her family in Miami.

            I think this is all perfectly reasonable but many won't and don't.  Which is, I suppose, another way of saying that I would never have hacked it at headquarters.        

I belong in the trenches with my friend the editor of the last forty years. "Reasonable expectation" is what I look forward to and I am determined to make it come to pass!

 

 

            Let's start with some unequivocally good news. We are, to echo the words of Mrs. Thatcher, a grandfather. Henry Heald arrived in the early hours of November 25^th. Mother, father and Henry all appear to be doing well and last Saturday, the morning before flying away to Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, Penny and I went over to Ealing, bearing gifts, to say hello. I am pleased to report that Henry seemed fine, slept throughout our visit, twitching slightly, not being sick or difficult in any way and is obviously destined to score 100 before lunch at Lord's in roughly two decades time as well as winning a Nobel Prize later, becoming Prime Minister, Pope,a national treasure and much else besides His two cousins in Florida are already rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of a third member of a gang to come and I am extremely pleased to be able to pass on news which seems to be to be good without reservation. I don't wish to tempt fate nor to be unduly triumphalist so meanwhile, this is what I had to write before the happy event.

 

            I'm sorry. I hate sounding old and grumpy but...

 

            Last week I ordered a Royal Horticultural Desk Diary from Amazon, for my mother's 89^th birthday. There should have been a saving though the charge for p and p lifted it more than somewhat. Anyway I ordered it and was told that thanks to the marvels of modern science I could "track" my parcel's progress using my special Royal Mail 13 character tracking number, It actually specified 13 characters and I duly put in my number and counted the characters which came to 13. However when I sent it I got the response "Sorry. Your tracking number is too long". Twice. I gave up.

 

            Earlier that day I had had a letter from some outfit in Preston saying that my aged Ma was getting a winter fuel allowance of £275. There was an asterisk next to the amount and underneath in parentheses the information that the amount was affected by the fact that according to their records there had until recently been someone living with my mother. This person had recently left and my mother's handout was consequently  being reduced. I thought this slightly peculiar as my mother has been living on her own since my father was killed in a car crash in 1972. I rang the people in Preston and the woman who answered was charm itself but could not alas help as this sort of thing was dealt with by someone else. After three different calls to three different numbers I got a charming man who said that he could do absolutely nothing without my mother's National Insurance Number which at that stage I did not have at my fingertips. I found it in the file and rang back. Another charming person answered, female this time, and from somewhere near Doncaster. She checked everything, took every conceivable sort of detail in the interests of efficiency, security and heaven knows what else and then said that she could find no record of my mother whatever. This, despite the fact that my mother's 89^th birthday is next week and she has, to the best of my knowledge, been drawing a pension for decades.

 

            I'm sorry, I really am, and I don't mean to sound old and grumpy, but there are times when I don't seem to be able to help myself. Meanwhile we flew off in a smart new Qantas airbus, sitting at the back of the plane in Tourist, me between Penny and a mercifully small woman. The video system was fantastically sophisticated and I was able to watch take-off and landing on screen as well as see Julie and Julia. A thirteen hour flight though so when we got to Singapore and went straight to the Tanglin Club without passing go we checked into our room (Number 14 aka Bouganvilla) and crashed out. Then after a short stay in an uber-Christmassy city - so many carols and lights and trees amid such stifling humidity, we embarked on another Qantas flight which was mercifully shorter though with a less sophisticated video system and marginally better food and service which wasn't saying much as the food on the first flight was disgusting and the service slow and charmless. Almost non-existent actually.

 

            And so to the Adelaide Oval for the whole of the Test match between Australia and the West Indies. Also, on the day, of our arrival, the annual, Lord's Taverners' "Sundowner" as guests of John Bannon, a former premier of the State, prominent South Australia cricket person into whom we had bumped at a party for the Australian cricket team at the London High Commission on the eve of the Lord's Test, My leg is playing up. But more a little later.

 

             

            More death I fear. Geoffrey Moorhouse, the former Guardian hack and author. Communications are fantastic. I was able to read poor Geoffrey's obits in Wiltshire and London, then compose a brief note for the Guardian, transmit it from the Tanglin in Singapore, read it on the internet and have a chat with Geoff Trew on Skype. Geoff said he would scan it and sent a copy asap. I had spent the previous Saturday afternoon with Geoff and Nicolas, son of the late great Arnold Ridley, freezing to death nostalgically while watching a one-sided rugby match at Rosslyn Park. I was also able to send a couple of "Royal Blogs" to the Telegraph and to read them as well. Unfortunately the Adelaide Hilton, aka 27 William Street, didn't have the relevant password which was with the Singing Professor in China and he didn't return until the Sunday, which meant that I was less communicado in Oz than in Singapore, at least to start with.

 

            The Guardian ran my recollections of a walk with Geoffrey in Yorkshire when he revealed that his real name was Heald, but that he lived his life as Moorhouse because his Ma left home v early and remarried. The death of those most intimately concerned meant that he could reveal this. What the Guardian didn't say was that I had read his latest elegiac column in the Oldie and had written to him saying that I, like him, was visiting New Zealand to see rellies and suggesting we might meet down under. Sadly Geoffrey wouldn't be making the trip as planned (and foretold in the Oldie) and his elder son Andrew emailed giving me the news as he had found my letter among his father's papers. Forward planning is God's idea of a joke: discuss.

 

            I am now sitting in a state of maximum e-frustration. On the one hand I keep getting little messages saying that my connection with the wi-fi thing is terrific, no worries. On the other every time I try to actually send messages I get another couple of messages saying that I have failed to connect with server, have failed at this, failed at that and am stuck, stymied. Any moment I expect the thought police to turn up and charge me with some unidentifiable Kafka-like offence. Being very simple I can't understand why something which is so wonderfully simple in darkest Wiltshire and cutting-edge Singapore is apparently not possible here. I have put my blogs for the Telegraph on to a memory stick which I am assured will work perfectly. Meanwhile I shall do the same with this and hope for the best. But I feel I would be better off like someone in Scoop, relying on cleft sticks, pigeons, paper and pencil. Ah progress!

             

            So, for now, I will cease and have a shower instead. An ancillary problem -  no not a problem  but a fact of internet life is that whenever anything fails to work everyone  else assumes it's your fault and that you are an imbecile, a Luddite, don't know anything, are too old to be alive at all. You think the reverse but don't dare say so. Everyone apart from me and sundry cats and dogs are out. The wife and the hostess are doing a girlie supper; the Prof is at choir practice; the boys are doing whatever boys do these days and I have spent a few happy hours trying to make sense of communications. I sense I may have managed a passable stitch up and sent cricket blogs to the Telegraph from the lovely Adelaide Oval where we have been every day of the Test. Lucky us. And it's enthrallingly and surprisingly two-sided. Gayle spent all day all day making a big hundred, I had lunch with John and Catrine Clay whose daughter lives in the hills at Mount Barker, our dinner host from a few nights back was there and came over to congratulate me on not looking quite so Pom(egranate) pink, and there are oysters and Aussie meat pies and pretend Cornish pasties with carrots in them - an amazing culinary solecism!

 

            I fielded a reassuring email from Caroline, my Ma's main minder - thank you Caroline - and another from my niece telling me she was finalizing her plans for a Wiltshire Christmas. So, in a frazzled way, all is right with the world. In fact, better than all right. Hurrah for Henry. Penny bought him an Australian cricketing teddy bear at the Oval and I like to think that in twenty years or so he will be rampaging through Australian cricketers, ursine or human. Meanwhile we're lucky to be here and welcome to the team. Good to have you batting at three or opening the bowling or whatever.                   

            Which reminds me. August 8^th. 2010. Fowey. A great cricket match. A band. The Army. Something to put in your diary and look forward to. I'll bore you about my leg some other time. I hear voices off - the ladies are back. The possums are at play on the roof. The West Indies are about three hundred ahead with three wickets left and a full day to play. So tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...Next stop the Barossa.  

 

 

 

 

            

I was going to do a Carpe Diem piece about being in Verona, noticing that a production of "La Traviata" was coming up, booking a couple of cheap seats in the Gods and thanking our lucky stars, God or whatever. However when we came back a week later and checked in to our (cheap!) hotel the clerk met us with a solemn face and said that the production had been cancelled owing to a national strike. Well, only in Italy, could an evening of pleasure be cancelled because of a national opera strike but nonetheless it was a warning of a different sort: making plans is God's invitation to practical jokes. Or something.

Anyway we went and had an expensive meal instead and I felt suitably chastised. I have to say, incidentally, that when the doleful concierge told us the news Penny immediately burst into tears whereas I'm afraid I laughed. I suppose I'm just punch drunk. Nevertheless whatever one's attempts at making the best of all possible worlds God has a strange habit of moving the goal posts when one is least expecting it. So Carpe Diem makes perfect sense but don't expect to have the same success rate seizing tomorrow, let alone the day after. They may never happen.

One of many enjoyable days in the Veneto was at Sirmione, where Tennyson and Ezra Pound both visited and about which they both wrote. It's a resort on the southernmost tip of Lake Garda and on a Sunday in March sunny, crisp and crowded. We had lunch with Kate, my god-daughter, her husband James and their two small children. Come to think of it Sirmione is probably not, technically, part of the Veneto. Also, God, playing an unexpected hand, caused the cancellation of our train - a trans Europe express to Basel - but I outwitted him by nipping on the next one to Torino instead. It means getting out at Peschiera del Garda rather than Denzeuela or whatever which I rechristened Desdemona but we still made it to Sirmione. Pause for thunderbolt.

Anyway Kate who has lived in Milan for a while wanted some recommendations for places to visit and although I'll send her separate recommendations I thought I'd rehearse the idea here first. Equal first and completely different would be Bassano del Grappa and Padova, aka Padua. I'd never even heard of Bassano which is about an hour by bus from Vicenza where we stayed for the first fortnight and on the main train line from Venice to the Brenner pass. It was here that I ate my first baccala with polenta - a rather elegant variation on a Norwegian salt cod with local maize porridge staple or, as in the posh-ish hotel by the river, the said porridge dried and rolled then grilled. Bassano was also where Penny bought me a ludicrously over-priced but wonderfully authentic black Borsolino hat which goes perfectly with the Magee Donegal tweed overcoat she bought me in Dublin the other year. Old friends and others will be as amused as me by the idea of Heald as a walking sartorial statement but the coat and hat plus the Williams boots, the cords, the tweed jacket well, eat your heart out Teasy-Weasy. No better than that. I actually look almost smart. Great packaging, pity about the product.

But the high spot of Bassano is the bridge, a wonderful, unique wooden edifice with a cover and cobbles, designed by the ubiquitous Palladio. At one end there is a Grappa bar and museum and the other another bar and a museum to the mountain troops or Bersaglieri of whom the locals are very proud but about whom Brits tend to laugh. We disparage them with jokes about North Africa but never, I think, fought them face-to-face on their own terrain in the Dolomites and Italian Alps. They wear large feathers in their hats, sing wonderfully, drink a lot of grappa and have turned the bridge into a personal shrine. Anyway we both loved Bassano and it joins that select band of places where in an ideal world I would like to rent a garret and write a book or two.

Padua is another and much better known story. We decamped from Vicenza for a final week based on the Albergo Verdi which was a nice newly renovated boutique job in the old university quarter marred only the pigeons which began cooing on our window-sill very early in the morning. The other refrain, mercifully confined to non-sleeping hours, was "Dottore...Dottore..." It seemed that a lot of students had graduated recently and there were little groups all over the University area serenading semi-naked people, often covered in foam or soap, and chanting "Dottore...Dottore" in honour of their new qualification.I've heard it said that everyone in Italy is a Dottore.

This was good and there were wonderful things to do and see - notably the Giotto murals in the chapel by the old Roman amphitheatre, the huge hall above the shops in the Piazza de Erbe, the massed angels in the dome of the Duomo Baptistry. As so often I loved the strange and quirky. In the top floor of the museum near the Giottos there is a coin museum, the Bottacin. It leaves me pretty cold but Mr. Bottocin lived in Trieste where he made friends with Maximilian, the Hapsburg who built Miramare and went to be Emperor of Mexico only to be executed by the soldiers of Benito Juarez, a scene inaccurately commemorated in Manet's picture in the National Gallery. All Bottocin's amazing numismatical cabinets are there along with some sad pieces of Maximiliania. There is the hat - a sort of white, feminine Ascot job which he apparently wore on the day of his execution. There is also a lugubrious portrait of a foppish general who was shot at the same time. I also enjoyed seeing Saint Antony's bottom teeth preserved in a chapel in his eponymous basilica. You couldn't help wondering whose teeth they really were. Also why so many people venerated such absurdities and why there were people clutching on to the side of his tomb elsewhere in church and apparently holding intimate conversations with the deceased. Sometimes I really dislike the Church. St. Antony, the city's patron saint, seems to have been a dab hand at rescuing infants from cauldrons of boiling water and sewing on severed limbs. Oh well. I enjoyed the teeth though.

Seriously though Padova , as the city is locally known, struck me, us, as being wonderful, not least because in a tourist sense it is eclipsed by Venice which is very close and full of tourists. Padova seemed not to be and yet it had loads of wonderful things to gawp at.

I went to Venice for one day and interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon, who has been setting crime novels in her adopted city for almost two decades. Also present was her friend Toni Sepeda who has written a companion volume of Commissario Brunetti's walks and backs it up with guided pedestrian tours of the city. So after a coffee-fuelled natter I accompanied Toni and two Chicagoannes on an hour or so of chilly trudge past the Guggenheim, down to the Salute and back up the Zattere. Penny and I had lunch in the Antico Dolo, recommended by Richard, my former literary agent and a haunt of Guildo's. I had the tripe. Very good and very typical.Then we stopped for just the one at Saraceno by the Rialto. This is touristy but is also a haunt of Brunetti and of her creator. Penny dropped Donna's name to our waiter which provoked much enthusiasm but no cut in costs. And so back to Padova on the train, feeling like real Italian commuters and rather superior to the tourists stuck in the Serenissima. She is gorgeous but she is over-priced.

And so back to reality. There was a copy of the Tablet with my piece on the trans-Siberian railway, waiting at home. Good old Tablet. It seemed reassuringly literate and intelligent - elitist you might even say - and none the worse for that. I sent my piece on Donna Leon and Venice to the Telegraph and my man there pronounced it "lovely". So that was good.

A day or so later I took the train to Wiltshire to see my old Mum. Coming back we were delayed because of a wipe-out of the signalling system near Taunton. No trains into Cornwall for hours and when there was it was standing room only. I was about to make unfavourable comparisons with Mussolini and trains running on time and then I remembered the morning we had arrived at Vicenza station to find a brusque "Cancellato" against the name of the trans-European express to Basel on which we had booked. So it isn't better in continental Europe.

It just SEEMS better.