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I didn’t know that much about him before the show: Australian, excitable hair, Not Perfect (bittersweet, moving), Taboo (v. funny with a narrow little sharp edge), that Rory had been a fan for a year or two and had a brief email correspondence with him…

Waiting for Tim to come on, we had the chance to survey the stage, like a version of Kim’s Game: three bottles of water, one boot, grand piano, electric fan and glass of red wine. Who lives in a house like this?

More or less what I’d expected, I think, a latter-day Tom Lehrer with perfectly crafted dark, funny and iconoclastic songs (and one poem) about Christian fundamentalism, statistics (“This isn’t a song about love; it’s a song about maths”), New Age wooliness, prejudice and breasts. The peak moment was perhaps at the crescendo of Canvas Bags (“take your … to the supermarket”), sung as a stadium rock anthem with unbuttoned shirt and hair streaming back in the wind (Ah, that was what the fan was for.) He’s a Dawkinsite, as came across quite clearly, but nowt much wrong with that, especially when it’s leavened with a little self-deprecating humour. I don’t mind at all hearing Christians criticised; usually we deserve it and if ever we don’t then it’s a chance for a Blessed-are-you moment (though usually, if we think about it again, we do deserve it after all). In any case, I’d rather live in a world run by Richard Dawkins than by Sarah Palin.

Afterwards Tim emerged from the backstage depths (appropriately the vestry of this converted Presbyterian church) and was remarkably perky and patient with requests for autographs, hugs and photographs. I didn’t ask for any of them, but hovered about and took a picture of him with Rory while he (TM) laughed at R’s hair. “Ha! The baby’s ginger too.” I’ll see if I can get it off Rory’s phone and put it up here.

Here it is.

To continue. We got to the car hire desk at the airport early, unconscionably early, when it turned out that a blip in the system (or someone with an over-decimalized brain thinking that 16.30 was the same as 6.30pm) meant that they weren’t expecting us for another three and a half hours. So we sat and watched the airy-planes until they found us some variety of Renault – a Clio, I think it was. It had thoughtfully been parked at the end of the row, so it didn’t matter whether I set off in first gear or reverse, and the windscreen wipers were fairly intuitive – a good start.

After a certain amount of random driving around Belfast we found ourselves outside the Maths and Physics department of Queen’s University. Since the gig (Tim Minchin, in case I haven’t mentioned it) was part of the university Festival we decided that this was probably close enough, and as a group of astonishingly clean and unmistakably maths students decided to call it a Sunday afternoon, we gingerly (no pun intended, Rory) edged into their parking space.

After a pizza and water (see what depths this driving business plunges me to) we got to the venue at around six o’clock, with an hour to go before the doors opened. Keen as we were to get into the first few rows, this seemed somewhat obsessional, so we went for a token walk to pretend that we weren’t that bothered. It didn’t make much difference anyway, because we were still the only ones there when we got back again. By seven there was a respectable queue behind us, enough for a few gasps and murmurs as the man himself strode through our midst, rather taller and less diffident than we had expected, though that was probably a combination of the boots and an entirely understandable desire to get in out of the October chill.

Anyway, it was all decidedly worth it; Rory was the first through the door, so we got our front row seats, about four feet from the stage.

Only for three days, from Europcar, via AutoEurope’s ridiculously low rates. The specific timing results from a combination of the Belfast Comedy Festival and Ulsterbus’s failure to acknowledge that any culchies from the far West might want to stay in the big city later than eight o’clock at night. In between Tim Minchin and Russell Howard it will be called into service as a book-hauling vehicle, as always.

I picked it up yesterday, after my usual pre-car nerves – night spent wondering whether I can remember how to steer, find the biting point, dip the headlights, find the windscreen wipers (most vital part of a car in Northern Ireland) etc. all expressed in the usual way by a dream in which I have to look after a baby. Analyse that.

Because he lived in Enniskillen.

If Siemens announce staggering profits for this financial year, a lot of it will be thanks to their seemingly perpetual contract to tinker about with Enniskillen’s “traffic management systems”. Underlying all the hustle and bustle is a fundamental assumption that if they pretend pedestrians and cyclists don’t exist then we soon won’t. They’re just in the process of removing the only pedestrian crossing on the immensely long main street (so long that it has six different names). Sometimes I feel like a genetic throwback, one of the few runt-like human creatures in Northern Ireland who has unaccountably failed to grow the usual metal and plastic carapace.

I am woken by an announcement, at 5.15, that breakfast is served. This isn’t actually as horrendous as it sounds, either the waking or the announcement. By seven we have docked, I have been reunited with my bags and together we have taken a taxi to the Belfast bus station. Sadly the first bus on a Sunday doesn’t leave until 9.45, but a friendly security guard watches over my stuff so that I can go for a walk to the Spar shop and back. The bus home is fine; I have to change in Dungannon but there is always someone ready to help with the bags, and M is waiting for me at the bus station in Enniskillen.

I’m still pondering the journey overall, and the lessons I’ve learned – will report back when any useful conclusions rise to the surface…

The morning is grey and foggy as I emerge from the chrysalis of G’s sofa, surprisingly comfortable once the kitchen scissors and sachets of tomato ketchup were extracted from between the cushions. No one else has been in the house since we left for Italy, so the household food supplies (the two bananas we ate then) hasn’t been replenished. G has bought some good hot chocolate, though (fair trade and organic) so I make myself a mug before we head back to the bus stop with an odd sense of reverse deja vu. I even have the great green suitcase that, like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, cannot be lightly discarded.

The cross-country train from Reading is busier than it was last week; but I remind myself that this is a Saturday morning rather than Sunday afternoon.




At Stafford the sun has come out as I wait outside the station for my sister to pick me up in her car. Apparently there has been an accident on the M6 and the radio traffic bulletins are advising drivers to “skirt around it” which means driving into Stafford and out again. It reminds me that it’s not only public transport users who are subject to random disruption and in fact, in minutes per mile, this is the longest delay of the whole ten days.




After a couple of hours with my family I’m off again, on another quiet train through Stoke (pictured here) to Stockport. Usually there would be a direct train to Liverpool, but this afternoon the line north of Crewe is closed for engineering work.




At Stockport, as I photograph the station, I realise that I’m about to take the last of my twenty-one train journeys (including the Tube and Metro) on this trip. It turns out to be one of the busiest, as it passes through the main Manchester stations on its way to the dark and mysterious Liverpool Lime Street.

(View from the passengers’ lounge across the Mersey)

I arrive several hours early at the Norfolkline ferry terminal in Birkenhead but there are already a few foot passengers there. We wait in the lounge and watch celebrity Family Fortunes – Barry McGuigan and the Nolan Sisters. There’s something appropriate about the cosy Seventies celebrities in this relaxed atmosphere, like sitting in your granny’s living room watching television with your cousins. We chat to one another, rummage through our bags, plug in our mobile phones to charge. I don’t know quite why it’s so different from an airport. It may be the staff: the woman on security, asking to look in my bag, says, “No reflection on you, dear”. Later it gets a little bit rowdier as the lads come in from the football matches in their Liverpool and Man U shirts, but there’s still no tension or impatience.






As we get on the minibus to be taken onto the ship I notice that it originally belonged to North Yorkshire County Council. This explains a lot. We used to live on the edge of the North York Moors, and any vehicle considered too decrepit to take Yorkshire children to school must really be hanging onto existence by the thinnest of threads.

On the ship I stake my claim to a comfortable corner in the bar by the restaurant and get into dinner early, at a spacious window table. Afterward I settle back on the padded bench with a large volume of John Dickson Carr and, when the text begins to swim, curl under a ship’s blanket and listen to the adjacent party of dog-breeders who’ve brought their charges – pets doesn’t seem quite the word – across for a show. I sleep well, apart from an occasional glare as I turn towards the overhead lights and think that I should have brought one of those things to cover my eyes. But each time I am asleep again before I can think of the word.

We didn’t fall off the rails.

I wake to a glimpse of landscape, under the big window blind, that is unmistakably French. There are some hills, but they don’t have snow on the top, so we must have got through the Alps. I sit on the floor and watch the dappled countryside with its distinctive church spires and high roofed farmhouses. I know almost nothing about French geography, but am starting to feel more confident.

When, half an hour before we are due into Paris, I see tower blocks in the distance and motorways alongside us, I am positively Pollyannaish. Then the train slows and stops beside a station sign. Dijon. Even I know this is not a suburb of Paris.


The attendant can be heard telling another passenger, with a note of pride, that we are now two and a half hours late. On the hung-for-a-sheep principle, or perhaps just sheer bloody-mindedness, we then spend forty minutes in Dijon station and thereafter inch along the rails at walking speed. No one can bear to ask whether this forty minutes is included in, or in addition to the two and a half hours.

And this is where we are as I write in my little Moleskine notebook; six people: three Italian and three English, making the best of things in a hot little compartment trundling through the French countryside. G and I will certainly miss our Eurolines coach and the other Englishman his connection on to Cologne. It was bound to go wrong somewhere, of course, and things could be a lot worse (after all, we haven’t been rained on for a week) but the uncertainty, coupled with the insouciance of the staff, is a bit niggling.

But the time passes relatively easily. The sun is shining, we are passing through beautiful countryside and everyone in the compartment is friendly. If the worst happens, we have several litres of wine and over a kilo of Gran Padano in our bags. Once, when G. is out in the corridor, a man comes round carrying a large tray.

“Vuoi un cornetto?”

Without looking I give a curt “No.” What would I be wanting an ice-cream for at this time in the morning? Later G. says, “I was offered a free croissant in the corridor.” and I remember the Italian word.

We get into Paris Bercy three hours late and SNCF staff are waiting at the exit handing out slips of paper which tell us where to write with “mail, suggestion or complaint”. I hope they don’t get too many suggestions.

I’m not convinced by this, so join a queue at the information desk. When it is my turn I try to ask, in what remains of my schoolgirl French, for official confirmation of the lateness of the train. The young woman behind the desk has got as far as understanding that I caught a train from a place called Enretard before suggesting that we switch to English. Finally she gives me a little square of paper headed Bulletin de Retard and specifying the train number and extent of the delay, with an official stamp. This mollifies me and we lug our bags through three more Metro stations to the international bus station.

The coach on which we were booked has left an hour and a half before, so I join the queue for ticket sales with more hope than anticipation. There is, as I had thought, another bus at 2.30 but I expect at best to have to buy fresh tickets with a hefty surcharge, at worst to be told that there are no seats available. I begin in French at the first window then, suddenly suspecting that I am about to buy a ticket back to Italy, break off to ask whether he speaks English. He doesn’t, but the man at the next desk does, and gravely examines my tickets and Bulletin de Retard.

“You want to go on the 2.30.”

I’m not sure whether it’s a question or a statement. He types interminably on his computer and I try to remember how many euro I have left. I don’t dare to speak. Finally he hands back our tickets, liberally annoted in blue ink. The 11.30 has been crossed out and replaced with what, allowing for the vagaries of French numerals, could possibly be a 14.30. On one ticket is written “retard train” while the other, by way of variety, says “train retard”.

“You check in here,” indicating an adjacent booth, “in ten minutes. You will see me there.”

Indeed we do, as he slides from ticket vendor to passport checker, so I don’t even have to interpret his hieroglyphics to another official. And there’s nothing more to pay. Suddenly this bit of the journey doesn’t look so bad after all. The coach, unlike the sardine can of Monday night, is a civilised quarter empty, and we pass quickly over the Seine and between the cornfields of northern France. A hazy question-mark still hovers over tonight’s 22.05 train from London to Stafford, but the nice ticket man told me that we will arrive at Victoria by half-past eight, so all appears pretty much bien.

The journey through France is smooth and sunny, our spirits lifted by the ubiquitous wind turbines and unimpeded speed of the coach. At Calais we go through the passport check without anyone being interrogated and join a short queue of coaches driving on board a ferry. I’m almost inclined to believe the 20.30 ETA. But the coach line is halted as we reach the front, a stream of cars allowed on and then the lights turn to red and the gates are closed, leaving our bus sad and solitary on the quayside.




After that it goes a bit pear-shaped, as they say, in gross disrespect to the noble and proportioned figure of a pear. We get on another ferry a couple of hours later, are mid-channel at the fabled hour of half-past eight and being driven rather jerkily through Kent as my train to Stafford (the last of the night) pulls out of Euston.

So it’s back to Lower Earley, G’s sofa (and chivalrously loaned duvet) and an emotional reunion with the big green suitcase. One more piece of contemporary life to round off the day; as we try to walk into Victoria tube station sirens start wailing, coach-loads of police appear on all sides and the whole place is evacuated and packaged up with yellow crime-scene tape. We don’t think it’s anything to do with us, but on a day like this we can’t be completely sure.

At around nine in the morning, when the little electric carts are still trundling around the streets, cleaning and collecting rubbish, I go into Lucca to visit the church of San Frediano. The saint is said to have brought Christianity to Lucca in, I think, the sixth century from his native Ireland, then the “land of saints and scholars” where I don’t remember what he was called, but am pretty sure that it wasn’t Frediano. Probably plain Fred to his mates. Inside is the mummified body of another of my favourite saints, Zita. She was a servant to a rich Lucchese family and had got into the habit of giving away bread from the household kitchen to the poor of the city. One day her master caught her sneaking outside, holding up the corners of her apron to make an improvised bag.

“What have you got in there?” he asked.”Only flowers,” she replied and dropped the apron corners. To, I suppose, the astonishment of both, this turned out to be the literal truth, as what had been chunks of solid Tuscan bread floated down to the floor in delicate petals. Zita’s body now rests in a glass box, wearing a lacy dress, a brown and wizened little Snow White, waiting for her Prince at the resurrection.






I wander back to the Hotel Rex, passing the statue of Puccini and the Piazza Napoleone, or Piazza Grande as the locals call it. Checking out, I am given a regalo – a small wrapped present which turns out to be a ceramic plaque of Lucca’s two towers. It’s another thoughtful gesture from the excellent management and staff, by whom I’ve become more impressed every day. Having chosen the hotel without particularly high expectations, I’ve been really delighted by the place and it will certainly be my first choice next time.






G. has joined me from Pisa by now and leaving our bags at the hotel we go for lunch – my first proper meal since Wetherspoons at Victoria. Afterwards we visit Cicli Bizzari, the shop from where we bought our bikes when we lived here, and now hire a couple for the afternoon.






We ride up to Nozzano Castello, the village seven kilometers north-west of Lucca where we used to live, and pass our old house there. Suddenly I catch a glimpse of the next door neighbour Luglio, a kindly and exhuberant elderly man and wonderful gardener who used to call “Signora!” over the wall and pass me baskets of sturdy and delicious vegetables.

Now we pedal fast down the little side-alley and meet him at his gate. He’s doing well, except for trouble with his eyes, and we’re delighted to see him.

The river Serchio, which runs between Lucca and Nozzano, isn’t in such good shape. Near Nozzano, where we cycle along its banks, it is still healthy, but under the bridge the water level is low with a thick scum of algae. We’ve never seen it like this before, in the seven years we’ve been coming here.

We cycle through the twin villages of Nozzano Castello and Nozzano San Pietro, deserted in the siesta, and stop at the church and the lane that led to the back gate of our old house. There’s a car in the drive, so we don’t intrude any further.

Cycling around the walls of Lucca is an entirely pleasant experience, with no motor vehicles except for the odd maintenance van and plenty of room on the broad path for cyclists, pedestrians and other self-powered bods to spread out and give one another space. In the city streets it’s more tricky, with traffic on most of the roads and bands of less-than-alert tourists, but with plenty of bell-ringing most cyclists manage all right. Outside the walls it’s harder again, in the full force of Italian traffic aided and abetted by sporadic cycle lanes, random parking and little old ladies who insist on cycling on the left, against the flow of traffic. The final part of the journey back from Nozzano is hairier than the rest, as a basket full of pesto, Gran Padano and cheap Tavernello wine makes me wobble far more than I had expected, but we make it back in the correct number of pieces, drop off the bikes and go back to Lucca station and on to Firenze.

(I’d forgotten to mention, by the way, that at SMN station on the Tuesday were policemen on those wheeled platform scooters – are they called Segways? – that Niles in Frasier once borrowed. They seem ideal for the Italian polizia, allowing them to play boyishly when they’re not too busy, fidget in style and remain taller than anyone who comes to ask them a question.)

Now from SMN we go around to Campo di Marte and await the train for Paris. This is the point at which the fact that it starts in Rome, previously unconsidered, hits us with its true significance.

Forty minutes before the train is due it shows on the departure board as on time. Ten minutes ditto. Three minutes ditto, and we start gathering up the luggage and shrugging our shoulders into our backpacks. Then, without warning, the board changes. “In ritardo 100 minutes”. A hundred? That’s… Yes it is. To be fair, it’s only actually ninety-five minutes late, half past ten, when the train wheezes into the station. Not to worry, is my last thought, as I snuggle down in my bunk. Judging from the way we’re rattling along, we’ll have made up half the time before morning, if we don’t fall off the rails entirely.

I wake up, thinking that I’m either on a train or a ship, and wondering why my bed isn’t moving around. Then I remember. I’m in Lucca, and it’s buying books day. After a comprehensive, included-in-the-price breakfast and a bit more wirelessing I go back over the walls and, by either luck or instinct, certainly not conscious thought, find myself in the little ‘piazzetta’, the open square where the second-hand books and prints are sold. I select a modest eighty-six or so, and airily pack them into my enormous fabric bag. I manage to stagger out of the piazza with something like insouciance, only to collapse on a step round the corner, under the incurious gaze of fifty or sixty American tourists. After a few more false starts, the bag and I work out some sort of modus operandi, and I succeed in lugging it back to my room. Even the fact that the bag is considerably wider than the hotel doors doesn’t faze us for too long, as we come up with the revolutionary scientific principle of turning sideways for a bit.




Piled up on the floor, eighty-six books look like quite a lot, and I package twelve or so up to post back to myself. I’ve looked at the PosteItalia website, and reckon it ought to cost around six euro using the economy service. After a battle of wills between me and the Scotch tape, won by the Scotch tape – something about a Presbyterian upbringing, I expect – I take the packet to the central post office, using the same vaguely divining method by which I found the books in the first place. Alas; the economy service no longer exists, and the parcel will cost thirty-three euro to post; more than it cost me to travel on the sleeper train from Paris. After various discussion of alternatives, none of which help with much except to practice my Italian, I walk out with the parcel under my arm and console myself with a lemon sorbet at a nearby gelateria. It’s a very good sorbet, and I am thoroughly consoled, especially when I get back and find that I do, after all, have room for all eighty-six books, together with the twenty-eight that I go out and buy later in the afternoon. By then the booksellers are all celebrating the birthday of one of them, with a large bottle of bubbly stuff, and I enter into a confused conversation about Delft. It turns out that the confusion is my fault, as my pronunciation of Irlanda sounds to them like Olanda. Insufficiently rolled ‘r’ I think.






After a little more wall-meandering I go back to the rest of the Roquefort. Somehow I don’t feel quite as fond of it as I once did. To improve my Italian listening skills (honest) I watch the Italian version of Deal or No Deal. It’s considerably jollier than I remember the English one to be, with computer-animated characters, contestants from each of the provinces, audience-participation songs with actions, beautiful hand-made boxes with weird things in them and the contestant’s family sitting on a sofa next to her. Tonight’s was unlucky, ending with a choice between 250 euro and a cactus, but 7,000 euro appeared from a small sack, by way of a consolation prize, and a good time was obviously had by all.

I wake up briefly, at about half past four in the morning, as the train groans to a stop and eases itself off again, like an old man cajoling himself up from a park bench. It’s due to stop at Dijon, pass through the Simplon tunnel and call at a few northern Italian towns before Firenze (Florence) and later Rome. I wonder vaguely where we are, and go back to sleep. At seven my alarm goes off, and judging from the houses I can see under the blind, we are definitely in Italy. The train is due into Firenze at 7.15 but we left Paris late when the attendant comes round at half past seven with our passports, he tells me that it will be another half hour before we arrive. Ten minutes later we pull into a station and I glance idly to see the name. Firenze Campo di Marte. Aargghh. Fortunately we have our bags packed and are able to stagger out before the train chugs on to Rome.

From the air alone we would know we were in Italy. It’s still cold, and there is frost on the tracks. We know this cold. For the final seven or eight months that we lived in Italy, we rented a farmhouse in the Mugello, the hills north of the city, and caught the train into this station for Christmas shopping and for G to play rugby. But there’s nothing much to see, other than the pitch, and we catch the next train for the seven minute journey into the central station, Santa Maria Novella. There I fail to find a fornaio to buy plain bread so we breakfast on the leftovers from our French picnic supper – Roquefort, tomatoes and those ubiquitous sandwiched biscuits with chocolate in the middle. To be strictly accurate I have the tomatoes and G had the biscuits, so it isn’t quite as bizarre as it sounds. While G. digests the gastronomic feast, I go for a quick gallop around the city, armed with camera, thus:

When I come back, G. goes to catch his train for Pisa and I wait at the station to meet Timea, the export manager of the Italian publishers Giunti. I’ve dealt with Giunti since we first started our online Italian bookshop (now www.crystalbard.com ) and Timea has been especially helpful, efficient and friendly. It is the first time we’ve met and we recognize one another immediately. We go to a new Giunti bookshop in Firenze and browse around together – I can’t think of a much better way of getting to know someone, unless it’s indulging in coffee and apricot tart at a corner café, which is what we do next. After that we go out to the Villa Giunti, the firm’s headquarters north of Firenze, towards Fiesole. It’s probably the most beautiful house I’ve ever visited in Italy, with ancient wall-paintings, a light gallery where the art and children’s departments work and a perfect library with huge windows opening on to the olive-strewn hills. I’m mostly lost for words, in any language, but nod as I’m welcomed and shown around with delicate Italian courtesy.

Back in Firenze I buy a ticket for Lucca at one of the automatic machines. It not only gives me the option of buying a ticket within Italy or internationally, suggesting the destination when I type L, U… but tells me the times of the next few trains and asks which I would like to take. The journey, as all Italian train tickets tell you, is 78km long, I have no eligibility for reductions, and have not booked in advance. So the price would be … imagining a similar situation in the U.K…. five euro. The train leaves in half an hour, as I have just missed one by seconds, but is already at the platform and I can get straight on and settle into one of the clean and comfortable seats. Looking around I see that special litter bins are marked inside the carriage for recycling of paper and cans. It’s the sort of detail we imagine in the Netherlands or Germany, but are rightly ashamed to find the laid-back Italians doing these things so much better than we can. The journey is smooth, quiet and quick, and I am soon back in Lucca, where we lived for a year and a half, and to which I cannot stop myself returning.

I’ve booked into the Hotel Rex, this time, next to the station and with precious wireless internet. The Rough Guide is a bit sniffy about it, complaining of a lack of atmosphere, but the staff are all exactly what most of us hope for, friendly and helpful without being pushy, and the rooms spacious and imaginatively furnished.






Mine is a bit dark, being at the back of the hotel looking out on a narrow alley, but we can’t all be at the front, and it is well-lit and a generous size for a single booking. To my mild surprise the wireless internet, which is free, works first time as soon as I get a username and password from reception, and I’m able to catch up with M, who is valiantly holding the fort at home, including snuffly son and missing books.






Later I go out to walk around the broad walls that circle the city, planning to pick up some bread, olives and water to supplement the remaining Roquefort. Distracted by memories, I am confused by a new chldren’s playground and come down from the walls too early, walking around the road for the rest of the way. But if I hadn’t, I would have missed the typical Lucchese sight; a young man cycling, in the chaotic rush hour, along the busy ring road, baby (six months at the most) in a carrier in front of him, while his golden labrador trotted along, also on the road, at the end of a sturdy lead. There are so many ways of travelling about, given a little courage and imagination.