Christmas in Cologne

I can remember very little of our few days back in Ameglia before we set off for Cologne for Christmas other than endless hours in the Internet Cafe in La Spezia checking trains and flights and a long conversation with Arne which filled in a lot of contextual detail of life in the boatyard here.  At one stage I gave up on cheap flights and we were about to book train tickets to Cologne, including the overnight sleeper from Milan for 300 euros each way for two, when bingo, I hit the German Wings web site.  This got us flights from Milan to Cologne for a ridiculous nineteen euros each way.

Arne looked in on the boat one afternoon clearly wanting to talk and gave us a much clearer insight into his life and aspirations.  Far from being the easy going drifter he at first appears I think he really wants to settle down with the Mother of his child, but by his description she is unstable and unwilling to commit to a family life.  Overall, he seems to be a frustrated man cresting forty and starting to ask uncomfortable questions about his life and what he has actually achieved.  Giovanna the owner of the marina and his employer is obsessed with money despite substantial personal wealth and her husband is a womaniser who had little to do with the business until a separate boatbuilding business of his own failed.  Mustafa lives in one small room on the top floor of the leaky old building which houses the marina offices.  Arne has tried to encourage him to move to better accommodation, but Mustafa is motivated by saving money to send home to Morocco.  The blue Mercedes is Mustafa's, though we have never seen him drive it – it is the status symbol to demonstrate to his Moroccan family his success in Europe.  Much of this has the ring of truth, but filtered through Arne’s quite jaundiced outlook on the world.  Arne also told us his approach to personal hygiene – “you don’t actually need a shower more than once a month”.  This too had the ring of truth judging by the odour that lingered in our saloon some time after he had departed.

Our trip to Cologne was uneventful, the biggest hitch being that we misread our local bus timetable, stupidly thinking that buses actually ran on a Sunday.  In the end we got a taxi the four miles to Sarzana station, which cost slightly more than one of our air tickets.  We stayed overnight in Milan, which gave us a chance to really appreciate the magnificence of Milan Central Railway station.  It’s a vast cavern of a place, a temple both to railway technology and Mussolini’s Italy, complete with overblown references to Imperial Rome and a memorial to the fallen in Abyssinia.  The arches covering the platforms outdo those at St Pancras and on arrival I felt distinctly under-dressed.  More theatre set than Railway Station I should liked to have emerged from the platform through a veil of smoke and steam in a homburg and crisp double-breasted suit with Sue on my arm in full length furs and high heels, a perspiring porter following behind with a trolleyfull of monogrammed trunks, suitcases and hatboxes.  Well, a chap can dream can’t he?

The flight from Milan was on time and very much like an air trip costing ten times as much.  Frankly for the price we had paid I had expected wooden seats and hanging straps.  I almost felt guilty and on arrival in Cologne refused the complimentary chocolate biscuit to help preserve German Wings profit margins.  Nicole met us in central Cologne and drove us to their house in the suburbs.  Although we had only spent a couple of weeks together in August it felt like meeting up with long lost old friends.  They are both teachers and have been married for about three years.  Thomas is around fifty and Nicole around thirty and currently taking a career break to look after young Joshi, now two years old.  They returned to Cologne from their boat in Barcelona in early December, partly to enjoy a traditional German Christmas with Joshi and partly I think as break from life on a small boat with a young child.  They live in a large semi-detached house in an area very like an English city suburb.  Thomas was brought up in the house and took it over when his Mother died a few years ago.  He gave the place a complete makeover, so now it is very smart, modern and minimal.

We arrived on the 23^rd December, the day before the main festivities in Germany on our Christmas Eve, called in Germany “Helige Abend” or Holy Evening.  I helped Thomas get in the last stocks of beer while Sue helped Nicole bake biscuits in festive shapes to hang on the Christmas tree.  Later we all went off to a nearby high street to buy the last few bits and pieces for the festival, including some tiny red apples also for dressing the Christmas tree.  While we were out Thomas and Nicole took us to a traditional Cologne pub “the Golden Cabbage” where we drank “Kolsch” the local Cologne beer served in test tube like 0.2 litre beakers.  This system works remarkably well, given enough waiters, as the beer simply issues from the bar in an unending stream of small beakers and the beer stays fresh.  I suspect many Germans don’t really consider beer as an alcoholic drink and I’m sure it’s possible with this system to get completely pissed whilst having no idea of exactly how much one has drunk.  However, thanks I suspect to the German Purity Laws which prohibit beer from having any additives or preservatives I don’t recall getting a hangover during our five days in Cologne.

On the 24^th Nicole’s parents (Joshi’s “Oma” and “Opa”) arrived in the morning bringing with them theChristmas goose which had been slaughtered a few days before.  Joshi was then put to bed for his usual lunchtime nap and so the Christmas preparations could begin in earnest.  While he slept the tree was put up in the living room, dressed with candles, apples, chocolates and biscuits and an improvised star made by me from some cardboard and silver foil.  Then the presents were assembled under the tree.  After Joshi’s nap we all walked to the nearby Lutheran church for the Children’s Service.  The Church was a severe modern building and the young female pastor conducted a very open service for the children, who were allowed to play in the aisles and take part in a nativity play.  Many of the children were too young to have a clear idea of what was going on, but one young lad of about ten with Downes Syndrome thoroughly enjoyed his role as a Shepherd.

By the time the service was over it was getting dark and we walked back to the house in the gathering twilight.  When we arrived Joshi was kept occupied while the Christmas Tree candles were lit, then the living room doors were flung open and we all sang Christmas songs as Joshi, his eyes wide with amazement, took in the magic of the scene.  Joshi was then given his presents to open, including a little table and chairs from Mum and Dad and a tricycle from Oma and Opa.  Oma and Opa, also a teacher, the head of a school, are besotted with little Joshi and perhaps most touching was Opa’s personal present to Joshi.  At the end of the second world war when times were hard and things were in short supply Opa’s own father had made him a horse and cart and a stable.  Finding the old gift in the loft Opa decided to renovate the toy and give it to Joshi.  Joshi seemed to sense the importance to Opa of this symbolic act of handing on the past and crouched patiently with Opa as he carefully demonstrated the toy.  Afterwards the adults swapped presents and we settled down to the Christmas goose, cooked to perfection by Thomas, accompanied by red cabbage and kneudel a kind of savoury steamed pudding and some excellent wines.

The 25^th was more like our Boxing Day, a time for chilling out in armchairs and helping Joshi to play with his new toys, punctuated with a stroll to help Joshi try out his new tricycle, which has a very useful long steering handle at the back, which a responsible adult can use as a manual over-ride when Joshi gets tired and starts going round in circles.  Oma and Opa left to go skiing that afternoon and on the evening of the 26^th Thomas and Nicole held a dinner party for us and several other friends.  Thomas and Nicole’s cooking was excellent, as ever, but the high spot of the meal was a box of cakes made by Christophe, a French pastry chef and the partner of Berndt, one of Thomas’ oldest friends.  The box and lid were made of peanut brittle and inside were layers of little cakes in the shapes of animals, the first being a layer of tiny swans. 

On the 27^th we left for Milan where we stayed for a couple of nights before heading off to Ameglia.  Thomas and Nicole and Joshi especially, gave us one of the most magical Christmases I can remember and it was a privilege to share it with them.  Joshi is a very special little boy, a smile is never far from his face and he is quick to forget his hurts.  He has enormous natural charm and is rapidly developing the wit to use it.  He is very lucky to be having so much attention at his age from both his parents during their trip to Barcelona and to have so many caring adults around him.  But then those around him are very lucky to have Joshi too.  Never having been to Germany before it was great too to learn a little more about German society and Thomas and Nicole and their friends.  I am sure we shall meet again.  One of the great lessons for me of our trip so far has been not how different the cultures of the major Western European countries are, but how similar.  From my conversations with Thomas and Nicole and their friends I might add that the post-war generations of Europe actually have more in common with each other than with the generations of their own nationalities that have gone before.

Venice

We travelled to Venice by train, changing a couple of times.  The Italian national rail network “Trenitalia” is remarkably like the old British Rail but with an occasional touch of faded grandeur.  Our first stop was at Viareggio, where we had an hour to kill which we spent in the station cafe.  Annexed to the cafe is a large waiting room with a baby grand piano in one corner, tasteful arrangements of plastic flowers and a display cabinet containing mainly empty champagne bottles for some reason.  We sat at a table next to a group of smart old ladies and a middle-aged couple with learning difficulties.  Two of the old ladies and the middle aged couple were still there when we returned to this waiting room ten days later, so it clearly is the place to go in Viareggio for those with time to kill and not too much money in their pockets.  Anyway, I had just left Sue in search of the toilets when in walked a distinguished old chap in a dark overcoat, clearly a regular, who boomed his order to the bar and sat down in my seat, despite Sue’s protests and a scandalised clucking from the old ladies in which the word “bimbo” came up a lot (the Italian for “young man”).  He turned out to be a charming old rogue who made it clear that at his age he was entitled to his regular seat whether it was occupied or not.  At one point he declared in a loud matter of fact voice to the crowd in general “the world will be a better place when I am dead!”  Returning from the toilet I caught Sue’s amused smile and sat meekly at a vacant chair making a threesome round the table.  He gave us each a boiled sweet and the ice now broken a conversation developed in English and Italian between ourselves, the old boy and the old ladies.  He declared what a delightful city London was because there were so many Italians there and how wonderful Venice was.  At one point he stated “I was at Stalingrad you know”.  I don’t know whether the Waffen SS took Italian recruits but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the old git had been an enthusiastic volunteer.  Well anyway this is I think what happened – our Italian is now at the stage where instead of getting into simple misunderstandings we are capable of really quite complicated ones.  But whatever the true meaning of our conversation we left for our train uplifted by the indomitable spirit of one old man who was prepared to be himself and didn’t give a toss who knew it.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, apart from getting off at the wrong station in Prato which resulted in a hectic bus ride across town only to find that our connection was thirty minutes late anyway.  By the time we crossed the lagoon the last glimmers of the sun were fading from the clouds and we arrived in Santa Maria station in darkness and the Venetian rush hour.  We dragged our cases through the station concourse and out onto the station steps where the fourteenth and the twenty first centuries collide.  I’d been to Venice once before but the scene still brought a tear to my eye.  The station fronts straight on to the Grand Canal whose banks are lined with fine palazzos, churches and brightly lit shops.  The Canal itself was like a busy high street, only full of boats not motor vehicles.  Its black water was churned into grey froth by so many water buses, taxis and working barges that it seemed amazing that their propellers could actually get a purchase in the agitated foam.  The large water buses (Vaporetti) were full of commuters heading for the railway and nearby bus station.  They were dressed like the commuters of any North European city in hats, coats and scarves, preoccupied with their own thoughts, their sheer ordinariness contrasting starkly with their extraordinary surroundings.

We dragged our cases through the throng, up and over a steep hump-backed stone bridge across the Grand Canal then down a smaller alley by a canal to our hotel – the Sofitel Venice.  It’s like any other bog-standard four star business hotel anywhere else in the world, except maybe the service is a little below par and the price is 50% higher, even in this, Venice’s short so-called “low season”.  But to us it spelt PARADISE, an en-suite bath and shower, marble-topped vanity shelf, hot water, crisp linen and a large well sprung double bed.  Although tired we were unable to contain our desire to see something of the City and unwilling to pay for an over-priced supper in the hotel, so we went for a stroll.  Walking Venice at night is one of the greatest pleasures the world has to offer – a medieval maze of narrow alleys and canals with ancient, mouldering buildings three and four storeys high, shutting out the sky.  Around each corner a fresh feast to the eye – a small square (campo) with a sixteenth century well, or a medieval church the size of a cathedral squeezed in cheek by jowl against more humble tenements.  Eventually we found what turned out to be the perfect restaurant to end the day, a rough and ready student haunt, fashionably undecorated with brown peeling paint and old wooden tables and chairs.  The place bubbled with noise and laughter and there was a steady stream of pizzas, spaghetti with mussels and fritto misto (bits of fried fish and squid) flowing from the kitchen.  Behind the counter a crop-haired barman in a grubby T shirt and with a mischievous twinkle in his eye fixed drinks and assembled them on tin trays, muttering jokes to the waitresses about the customers.

About seven the next morning, as dawn was beginning to filter through the curtains of our room, I was awakened by the unmistakeable sound of air-raid sirens going off around the City.  Even in our supposedly post cold war era the noise still freezes my blood and since September the 11^th who isn’t haunted by the possibility of a dirty nuke being set off somewhere?  As the fear of Armageddon subsided from my mind I thought “Acqua Alta”, the high water that afflicts Venice several times a year when low air pressure and the wrong combination of winds send the waters of the Adriatic flowing across St Marks Square and seeping into the rest of the City.  Sure enough the sirens turned out to be a flood warning and by eight o’clock I could see from our terrace at the top of the hotel, workers putting out duck boards in the streets below.  By ten o’clock the water was over the pavement in front of the hotel lobby as a group of bewildered looking Japanese tourists were being assembled in the foyer.  The high water afflicted the City every day for several hours around lunchtime for the next three days.  My over-riding impression is of how the Venetians just take this in their stride, putting on their wellies and making their way to work across the duckboards, taking in the cafe tables and chairs as the water starts to wash across the pavement and sitting in their shops reading a book until the water retreats far enough for them to open up for business again.  For us the floods kind of added to the fun, trying to pick our way from one landmark to another without getting our feet wet and looking out from St Marks at the tourists in the Square below making their way along the tiny duck boards like ants in a flooded colony.  But this year has been the worst on record for Acqua Altas and it must be very wearing for the Venetians and God knows what it does to the fabric of the City.

We spent our ten days doing the tourist trail, walking the City and hopping on and off the Vaporetti both in Venice itself and the outlying islands of the lagoon.  When we weren’t sightseeing or eating out we generally spent our time taking long, luxurious hot baths.  What can one say about Venice that hasn’t already been said?  If any of you haven’t been – all the superlatives you have heard about the City are true. 

For me Venice poses two intriguing questions – first, how the hell does it actually stay up?  It has been in decline since the Great Plague of 1630 and travellers have been writing about its physical and spiritual decay since at least the 18^th century.  From what one gathers its foundations have the consistency of a soggy digestive biscuit and many of the Palazzos and Campanile lean perilously.  The Acqua Alta is getting worse year by year and no one has yet come up with a definitive plan to defend it from the sea for a sensible fraction of Italy’s gross national product.  And yet I can’t really see Venice slipping beneath the waves like some vast sand castle.  The Venetians seem to have a talent for keeping the City patched together and for turning decay into an art form and a principal component of the City’s inexpressible beauty.

My second question is – who exactly are the Venetians?  Venice is a City with a past, but no present or future other than to trade on its past.  This means it lacks a vital constituent of the character of almost all other cities – economic growth and all that goes with it.  Thus one can visualise Londoners for example as a series of caricatures symbolic of the City’s growth – the East End barrow boy turned Eurobond Dealer, the Jewish taxi driver from Golders Green, etc.  But the Venetians?  By contrast they seem to be shadowy figures – Gondoliers, shop assistants and museum attendants – people represented by rows of brass name plates with bell pushes outside common entrance doors down dark and damp alleyways.  This sense of mystery is accentuated by the atmosphere of the City itself and its history of intrigue and paranoia. Not for nothing is the carnival mask the City’s most potent symbol and throughout Venice there are Lion’s Mouth post boxes into which people could drop accusations about their fellow citizens.  I think I came closest to answering my question on a busy Vaporetto one evening.  Stood on the crowded ferry was an old woman wearing a long coat and a large pillbox-like hat.  She had a large downward pointing nose and cat-like, almost oriental eyes.  There was something aristocrastic and inscrutable about her expression, perhaps a product of her distinctive features.  I cannot recall seeing anyone like her in the works of the great Venetian Masters and yet at the same time she looked as though she had stepped out of a painting by Titian or Tintoretto.  She seemed to know all the commuters on the ferry and passed the time of day with many of them.  I have no idea who she was or where she was going, but in my mind she was undoubtedly a Venetian.

As a parting note on the City my favourite quote from a traveller is from Edward Gibbon author of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” who was a visitor in the mid 18^th century:

“The spectacle of Venice afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust.  Old and in general ill-built houses, ruined pictures, and stinking ditches dignified with the pompous denomination of canals; a fine bridge spoilt by two rows of houses on it, and a large square decorated with the worst architecture I ever yet saw.”

Ah well, I guess you can’t please ‘em all.

Winter on the Magra

It’s around midnight and I’m typing this lying in bed in “La Fulica’s” forward cabin.  There is no natural light in this cabin which is effectively a “V” shaped metal box.  Most days it is very quiet here, but sometimes if the sea is very rough the swell makes its way the mile or so up the river Magra and sways the boat from side to side making her jerk up and down on her mooring lines and rub fenders with the neighbouring boats.  It’s just such a night and from inside my metal box I can hear the mooring lines creaking and straining and feel the boat rolling from side to side like a baby’s cradle.

Although it’s a month since I last wrote, La Fulica has moved precisely nowhere and for much of the time Sue and I have been hibernating.  It’s hibernating weather.  Down here the days are even shorter than in the UK – by four o’clock in the afternoon the Sun drops below the spine of wooded hills which rise high above us on the other side of the Magra and we enter the twilight zone.  Also, November is the rainy season, or so we have been told by Giovanna and her German “boy”`Arne, and I hope to God they are right.  We have had days and days of rain of every description from monsoon to light drizzle.  The really heavy rains makes a loud drumming on the steel deck above this cabin, emphasising the warm and cosy burrow like atmosphere within.  Some days the cloud base is so low that it clings in wisps to the wooded hills and hangs only a few hundred feet above the nearby hill village of Ameglia (pronounced like the girl’s name Amelia).  Usually every three or four days the Sun comes out for a day or two and we emerge from our den blinking like moles in the sunlight.  The sunlight here is so warm and golden, like high summer in England, that it fetches out the whole population of this charming valley. It also fetches out the washing to be aired – the flying of sheets, pillowcases and tent-like knickers in the most conspicuous possible places seems to be regarded as a fundamental human right in Italy, rather like the bearing of arms in the States.  On La Fulica we have enthusiastically joined in with this tradition with socks and T-shirts hanging everywhere, like bunting on a flag day.

For the first time in years I actually feel I have time on my hands rather than no time at all.  Sometimes I feel a vague sense of guilt that surely I should be doing something.  If we were broke and in need of work it’s a type of existence that could drive one mad with envy, frustration and boredom.  But because we have some means, this life is an incredible luxury for which I try to keep reminding myself to be grateful.  So apart from sleep late and eat biscuits, what have we actually been doing with ourselves?

Our first couple of weeks were spent getting the feel of the local area and the marina and sorting out logistics.  The marina has so far proved to be all that we hoped it would be – quiet and undemanding but with enough activity to make it interesting.  We have established that Maria/Giovanna Gatti is called “Giovanna” by everyone.  She is here frequently with a distinguished white haired middle-aged man who we are fairly confident is “Mr Gatti”, her husband we presume although he could conceivably be her brother.  The Moroccan “boy” is actually called Mustafa, not Mahmud, as I reported last time.  “Boy” is a euphemism as both Arne and Mustafa must be at least pushing forty.

Arne has good English so we know something of his story.  He says he came here ten years ago in a truck en route to Africa and just stayed.  The truck, olive green ex-British army, is in the boat park rusting and gathering weeds and has been given a surreal edge by the addition of a naked child’s doll sat on the cab roof.  Arne has, I suspect, a dope smoker’s attitude to the passing of time, so he could have arrived anytime within the last five to fifteen years.  However, he has a daughter who looks to be around ten who spends part of the week with him on his boat and part with her Mother.  He comes across as a decent guy who will do his best to help anyone.  In our first few days here he tried to get us a car – a Lancia Thema Estate which one of the boat owners was actually planning to scrap, however we gave up on the idea because of the paperwork.  Arne rides a motorbike and when he learned I was a rider his immediate reaction was “anytime I don’t need it feel free to use my bike”.  Giovanna has been similarly free with her old car which we are welcome to use for shopping.  Being English and worried about things like insurance and imposing on people’s good nature, we haven’t actually taken these offers up yet.

Mustafa speaks no English and so is more of an enigma.  He has a gentle nature and kindly eyes and is a dogged communicator who will always have a crack at a conversation in Italian, English and sign language.  Mustafa lives on the site somewhere, unless he sometimes comes to work in his dressing gown, but we are not entirely sure where – Sue and I have our different theories.  Sue came across a mysterious Moroccan looking bloke smoking in the toilets a few days ago who seemed embarrassed about being seen by her and whom she speculates is Mustafa’s lover.  Could he be the owner of the old blue Mercedes parked in the yard?  Perhaps we will find out.  Mustafa and Arne work together around the marina at odd hours, generally when it is not raining.  Giovanna supervises, sometimes with the aid of a megaphone which is mounted threateningly outside her office window and through which she occasionally calls “Mustafa, Mustafa”.  I get the impression that Giovanna is most definitely the boss and that she knows what she wants, but not always how to get it.  Arne and Mustafa are treated like family and clearly like Giovanna although her demands often seem to provoke an exasperated smile.  Mustafa and Arne seem to work happily together although Mustafa can be ham-fisted, in Arne’s words he is “not practik”.  Mr Gatti’s role is less clear, but he is clearly respected, maybe he has retired from some other profession.

Mustafa has, however, had slightly more success in helping us with transport.  Partly I suspect at Giovanna’s prompting he undertook to supply us with two bicycles for the princely sum of 100 euros (about sixty five quid).  This process took about three weeks.  First Mustafa sold us one bike, an old one of his own I think, for fifty euros, which we paid on condition he fixed the front lamp.  Then he used some of the fifty euros to buy the second machine, an elderly mountain bike.  This turned up after about ten days and when I tried it the chain promptly fell off.  At this stage we had one bike paid for waiting for Mustafa to repair the lamp and one not paid for waiting for the gears to be fixed.  During our frequent but good-humoured conversations in pidgin Italian, English and sign language the word “domani” would feature heavily – the Italian for tomorrow.  Eventually both bikes got fixed after a fashion and Mustafa even give us an impromptu ten Euro discount on the second bike. 

We’ve started to get to know our neighbouring boat owners, on one side is Oscar, an intense Italian Swiss who according to Arne manages pub rock bands.  Some years ago he sailed all over the world on his boat which he clearly loves and comes to visit from Switzerland every two weeks.  He welcomed us with a bottle of wine and tries to entice us to go to Giancarlo’s, a small shabeen in a neighbouring boatyard – “for ten Euros you get two courses and all you can drink”.  Arne’s view is that Giancarlo’s food can be very good “but when it is bad it is awful and if you have to work in the afternoon, well ...”  So far we haven’t summoned up the courage to go.  On the other side is a sailboat owned by two brothers who race every weekend with a crew of guys, including two charming old chaps, who come from all over North Italy.  They’re a decent and unpretentious bunch.  Last weekend was the last race of the season and they were determined to compete although their engine is very poorly.  Anyway they limped out under power, had a good days sailing which secured them third place in their class for the season and then had to be push-towed back up the Magra by Arne in the marina’s tender.  That afternoon they shared cheese, wine and homemade apple pie with us to celebrate.

The other marina characters we have got to know are Bronzina and Gadafi, the two dogs.  People around here don’t seem to go in for burglar alarms much, but everyone seems to have at least one dog trained to bark aggressively.  When  we go out walking it’s not uncommon for us to start a chain reaction of barking dogs all the way up a hillside as one animal starts another off then another to a chorus of Italian swearwords for them to shut the **** up.  Most seem to bark because it’s their job rather than because they want to and some even do it lying down.  I’ve seen several bark very heroically whilst discretely backing away from us towards the safety of a stout fence.  Bronzina and Gadafi go in for this obligatory barking, but when you get to know them are actually two old tarts.  Bronzina is a rather dim-witted and very elderly Spaniel who hobbles about the place and doesn’t understand that she isn’t cute any more.  Gadafi is a mongrel and seems to comprise the ugliest features of a Bulldog and a Chihuahua.  She’s actually very intelligent and Sue’s winter project to befriend her was accomplished in about two hours.  Now she comes to greet us when we enter the marina and follows us around.  When we get on the boat she sometime sits on the quayside looking at us longingly – however, dog fleas and boats are not a good combination, so on the quayside she must stay, I think.

While waiting for the bikes we explored the local area on foot and by bus.  Amazingly, Ameglia, a village of maybe two or three thousand inhabitants has its own tourist information office, staffed in the mornings by three young women.  When we visited it took them some time to overcome their shock at seeing two customers, but after that they were very helpful, one speaking to us in reasonable English and the other two looking up ‘phone numbers in the Yellow Pages.  From them we got the local bus timetable and armed with this and a couple of books of tickets from the bus station in La Spezia we were away.  The rural buses are not very frequent and they don’t run after about seven o’clock in the evening, but they do at least run on time.  They are used by school kids and housewives and the odd man, in fact some of the men are very odd.

Ameglia our local village is divided into two, the main hill village which is an amazing jumble of medieval houses and alleyways built around a small castle and a community of more modern houses, shops and a supermarket on the main road.  About four miles away is Sarzana, our nearest town.  Such is the wealth of Italian culture that although it has a near intact medieval centre, fine piazzas, town walls and a castle it doesn’t even rate a mention in most guidebooks.  In one of the piazzas is a large statue of a naked man, I’m not sure what he commemorates, but I think he’s Mussolini era muscular fascist and I’m sure he is meant to look stern and marshal.  However, either the artist, the model or more likely both were gay as there is something rather camp about the stance, emphasised by rather pert little buttocks and a very foppish hairdo.  I could imagine them laughing about the commission in the artist’s studio, maybe their joke on Mussolini or what they may have looked on as this rather dull little provincial backwater.  We admired the buttocks from an outside table of a nearby cafe which did a very decent lunch.

About three weeks after our arrival on the Magra, Patrick, our friend from Worcester, came to stay for a few days.  We hired a car for the week and picked him up from Pisa airport, where we made the obligatory visit to the Leaning Tower in the Field of Miracles.  The Tower itself seemed to me a very ordinary building compared to the much more monumental cathedral and baptistery, but ones eye is irresistibly drawn to the tower’s gravity defying lean – a good example of how a cheap theatrical trick can upstage the most accomplished of performances.  For me the most remarkable thing about the whole site is how new all the buildings look.  Because they are faced with white Carrara marble the details of the arches and statuary look as crisp as when they were made, like ivory carvings.  Surrounding the Field of Miracles are the usual souvenir shops.  Why is it that only the truly great historical sites attract the most tawdry and tasteless tourist crap?  Sue took a particular fancy to a white plastic Leaning Tower table lamp.

Patrick brought with him some vital supplies – two learn Italian courses with tapes and CDs, two very large jars of Marmite (which mean that the only Marmite problem we now have is whether Sue will be able to eat it all before its 2005 “use by” date) and, joy of joys, an emergency curry pack comprising of twenty or so spices and a stack of Indian cookbooks and recipes.

During Patrick’s stay we looked in on Florence, which we had all been to before, but wanted to take another look at.  We only had an afternoon so we “did” the Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi.  Maybe it’s old age, but I just don’t seem to have the stamina to walk an entire gallery these days, by the time we reached the room full of Botticellis I hit cultural overload.  However the view of the River Arno from the Uffizi’s corridor is a wonderful tonic and the troops of Japanese tourists were fascinating and scary.  A party of thirty or forty Japanese sweep through the museum about every fifteen minutes, stopping at the thirty or so most famous pictures (the Birth of Venus etc).  Each party has a Guide who uses a microphone which transmits to small earpieces worn by each member of the group.  Usually one cannot hear the Guide so one has the impression of a party of Japanese robots who arrive in a room, move up to the “famous” picture, then all turn round and look at something else at precisely the same moment, then all walk out together.

We also revisited Genova, about which Sue and I have become even more polarised.  She now hates it with greater passion while Patrick shared my fascination.  We arrived in a rainstorm and parked in a cavernous multi-storey car park which is built into a hillside and is part of a large office complex which seems to include the Ligurian regional local authority’s version of an English County Hall.  The place was instantly recognisable by the ranks of bored people in cheap suits staring blankly at computer screens – the face of bureaucracy the world over.

When we weren’t sightseeing we seemed to be cooking.  Patrick and I had so much fun in La Fulica’s tiny Galley that we didn’t actually get round to eating out.  Patrick cooked us a curry (followed by many more after his departure, thank you, Patrick) and we cooked a few Italian recipes together from Marcella Hazan’s cookbook.  Sue is beginning to get jealous of Marcella as I seem to spend more time with her than I do with Sue.  High spot of our culinary adventures was a Zuppe di Pesche (actually more of a fish stew than a soup).  For this Patrick and I drove to La Spezia and cruised the market, which has a great atmosphere.  My theory was that the biggest, ugliest mother****ing fishes should be the most tasty as no one would want to sell them on the grounds of their good looks.  In the end we compromised and bought one monster and one quite good-looking fish.  I hadn’t realised however just how expensive fresh caught fish is and these two large beasts cost us fifty euros.  Still the fishmonger did scale and gut them and throw in the head of an even larger and uglier mother****er for the sauce.  That evening La Fulica smelled and looked like a Russian fish factory ship as we cooked up the fish heads and stripped them of their meat before making the rest of the Zuppe.  Washed down with good local wine it was quite a meal, although I suspect Sue wasn’t entirely convinced it had been worth the money, plus a whole days time and effort.  Sue has the pragmatic attitude of the naturally thin that food it there to be eaten when you are hungry, that you stop eating when you don’t feel hungry any more and that, well, that’s about it really. Strange.

While we had the car we made as much use of it as possible.  This included a visit to Gerardo Mobili. Gerardo has a large furniture (mobili) store in Sarzana and one in Viareggio and advertises heavily using his own face on the roadside posters.  He looks pale and pockmarked, wears a loud check jacket and has the haunted face of an over-geared chain-smoking neurotic.  How could we resist?  His Sarzana store did not disappoint.  As well as a shed full of MFI type junk there is a whole warehouse devoted to pound store type cheap tat, arranged in isles where every item is a standard price from two euros to about ten.  The high spot of our visit was a stack of plastic mouldings of the last supper, hand-painted to give Jesus and his disciples strangely Asiatic faces.  They were all knocked down to five euros as each little plastic tableau had four of five of the disciples heads missing – maybe at some point they had been stored next to some little plastic Roundheads who had gone in for some late night iconoclasm in a dark Shanghai warehouse.  To top it all, on our way out we actually saw Gerardo himself in a long dark raincoat trying to slip into his own store unnoticed.  He looked rather older and more haunted than his posters.  IKEA have just opened a store in Florence and no doubt he is anxiously scanning the papers for the planning application for IKEA La Spezia which will drown his business in a flood of cheap but fashionable Scandinavian tat.

Having a car again made me realise just how dependent on them our culture has become.  If the Blair government wants a real measure of social exclusion they could do worse than car ownership.  Without a car you are cut off from the out of town shopping malls that are the true repositories of our Western cornucopia and ones’ ability to act on the consumer impulse that drives our economic growth is dramatically restricted.  The car also punctured one of my Guidebook-driven pre-conceptions – I think I wrote in an earlier newsletter that supermarket culture hasn’t caught on so much in Italy.  This is true to a certain extent, but with a car one quickly sees that Mall culture is growing and that hypermarkets are springing up all over the place.    

Given our years of indoctrination into the culture of buying “nice” things for no obvious purpose it is perhaps not surprising that that having dropped Patrick off at Pisa Airport we were drawn like addicts in search of fix to the new IKEA outside Florence.  It turned out to be a strangely emotional experience.  No doubt as a matter of strict company policy it turns out that every IKEA store from Gateshead to Naples has an identical layout and sells identical stuff at identical prices.  La Fulica having been partly equipped from IKEA we were able to buy more striped cushions and add to our store of cutlery with identical items.  Because the stores are so alike wandering round actually made me feel quite homesick, as patrolling IKEA for no obvious purpose had been one of our major leisure activities in the UK.  It also led me to play a familiar mental game of inventing names for new IKEA products – “Bollux” – the moulded rubber table lamp that bounces when you knock it over and “Krap” – a range of picture frames woven in a raffia-like material made from recycled plastic shopping bags.

And another thing .... No, I think that’s enough of a rant for one day.

Anyway, the car went back after a week and now we’re happily wobbling around the place on our second hand bicycles.  We have now had news from our various fellow travellers of earlier in the year.  Thomas, Nicole and Joshi are still safely in Barcelona, although they have had major engine problems.  They return to Cologne soon for a couple of months and have invited us to stay, an offer which we have gladly accepted, hopefully for Christmas.  Bernie and Sarah are in Winter moorings near Montpelier with Bernie investigating a problematic gearbox and Chris and John have reached their planned Winter destination near Rome from whence they are flying back to the UK for a couple of months. 

Gradually our winter is beginning to take shape.  On Monday we are off to Venice by train for ten nights in a four star hotel.  Last we heard St Marks Square was under a metre of water, but frankly if the beds are soft and there is a large shower and a bath we will be happy.  Then perhaps we will go off to Cologne for Christmas and after that friends and family will be visiting and the boat will have to come out of the water for two or three weeks for bottom cleaning and anti-fouling and all that stuff and then of course there’s the big carnival in Viareggio ...  Makes me feel tired just thinking about it.  I think I’ll snuggle up and go to sleep, we have a busy day of not doing very much ahead of us tomorrow.