All serene

Back from Venice, which was fascinating and strange, and which I liked best late at night, threading through the tiny back streets and canals just made for black-cloaked assassins to prowl. I didn’t find it as wonderful as I found Florence, the only other Italian city I've visited, with which I fell in love immediately, and to which I would return and do every single thing again. Venice is hard work at times, and crowded, and slowly dying, and utterly magnificent as it decays, but I'm not quite sure it is loveable. I would love to read a history of Venice that focussed not on the politics and Empire (and of course the political system was fairly popular with the commonalty. Systems that limit the chances of a maniac getting power and doing whatever he likes to whoever he doesn't like, whilst bringing a reasonable amount of economic succcess, tend to be popular when you compare them to the alternative) but on urban planning. Its monuments also tried to flog audioguides rather than having information sheets, and I am less keen on Tintoretto than Ghirlandaio. I had some excellent ice-cream, took lots of photographs of tiny canals, stayed in a very nice hotel (on the Grand Canal,perfectly placed to be free of crowds yet right by a Vaporetto stop), met up with a friend who was coincidentally in town for a conference and bitched mightily about mutual academic acquaintences, all wearing my flowery coat that is just made for this sort of thing. The airport had a ground staff strike on the way home, but happily Jet2, for all their desparate attempts to flog stuff and offering Pot Noodles on the plane, had organised a bus to Treviso, and I was home only 90 minutes late. It would have been less, had not there been some rather dopey passengers on the preceding flight to Bucharest.

In other good news, I did the flights without drugs (other than Stugeron) and was fine. This is good, not only because it means that I'm getting over fear of flying (something the drug has been instrumental in, in that it has allowed me to process my reactions rationally and accept that just because my senses are telling me that the plane is plummetting sideways towards earth doesn't mean that it is actually plummeting sideways towards earth out of control) especially as I have discovered that temazepam is a class A drug in certain countries I have been taking it to the past few years. Whoops. Now, if only the wax-coated-hamsters would remove themselves from my ears.