The presents have been wrapped, in red and brown and silver. The house is clean, and the laundry dried in time. But I am obviously becoming my mother and can’t throw out the newspapers I haven’t yet had time to read. No worry – this is what train journeys are made for.

Sarah was in town the other day, and we were talking about London news and New York news, and I said, “Yah! The Suffolk Strangler!” “They’ve picked up a second guy,” I said, because I say I don’t have time to read all the newspapers, but evidently I have time enough to read and memorise the crappiest bits, “and the papers interviewed his father, and the father said, ‘He can’t have done it; he’s not smart enough.’” “Oh,” Sarah said, “is he a Chinese mother?”

I was going to blog earlier this evening, but I was hungry and couldn’t think. “Il n’y a rien dans la maison,” Olive said, and in my mind I saw the one open packet of parsley in the vegetable drawer. Tomorrow we go to Paris, and there will be tables of festive foodery, I’m sure, glistening in the candlelight. But tomorrow is tomorrow, whereas tonight there is cold risotto stuck to the bottom of the Tanyu pot. “There’s some stilton in the fridge,” I said, because I knew we had bought his parents a half-kilo of cheese. And then – I have bright ideas, you see – I remembered the party treats for Maud’s Christmas Eve dinner, and I said, “And we have two tins of fancy biscuits.” I remembered more gifts we were bringing, and I said, “We have prosecco!” “You are mad,” he said, and we went out for burgers. Big, fat stacks of burger, and a bowl of chunky chips for two. I was hungry, and then I wasn’t.

It has been a mad couple of weeks. I worked and worked, and then I worked some more. Then we went on the slides. I tell you! You think slides are slides, but I was funny in the head and weak in the knees at the end of it all. I took the slide from the fourth floor, with its sharp dip at the top the moment before gravity grabbed me by the ankles. I went “uhhHHHHH” all the way down. We wobbled all the way home.



Another day we took the slow bus to Little Venice. The barges were red and green and purple on the Regent’s Canal. It was very cold, but the birds were taking it well – I guess being a goose is like being swaddled in a goose down duvet all day. Our noses were icy-tipped by the time we fell into Damien Hirst’s curious collection at the Serpentine. Five black pots posed next to five black medicine balls. (Art.) A pair of sneakers sat on an air vent. (Art.) There was a mattress attached to one wall. It had been doused in blue paint, which had dripped down to the floor, and dried in streaks. “This art makes me want to smack someone,” I said, and Olive ducked.

One room held a sculpture of three larger-than-life hunks of flesh. They were a dirty pink and lined with thick layers of fatty tissue. There was blood on the floor beneath and around them. Some hapless show attendee had stepped in a puddle of blood, his telltale shoe prints first dark, then lighter, then lighter still as they curved away from the work. The gallery assistants grinned at each other and rolled their eyes before one of them came back with a roll of kitchen paper.

We went outside to Sarah Lucas’s shire horse pulling marrows in the mist.

India came to town. “Do you like crafty thing markets?” I said. “Come on,” I said, “you like crafty thing markets.” We went to the Sunday UpMarket, where the young ’uns were out and about in messy ponytails and skinny jeans, in high-top Converse sneakers, in chunky wallet chains, in large plastic-framed sunglasses for the large Sunday sun.

We bought a necklace and a beanie and a wicked bag. We bought pies to go. It was a frenzy.



You know what is a good Sunday dinner? It is pies, and curried carrots, and a brisk green salad. Even if we didn’t make the pies ourselves. I’d bought a pieminister I hadn’t tried before, a Christmas special called the Christingle. It was roasted parsnips, honey, chestnuts, cheddar, some rosemary, maybe, I don’t remember, but it sounded good on the card.

(I remember now, though, that night we celebrated Marc’s birthday at William IV up on Shepherdess Walk, with the old-timey piano player all jaunty-like, and the stuffed animals watching us, with glassy eyes, through dusty dioramas. The candles were melty wax all the way down the brass candlesticks.

“What’cha order?” Kris said, and I said, “The roasted squash salad, with the parmesan.” “Oh,” she said, “are you vegetarian?” “No, no,” I said, “please, no.” “Then why,” she said, “would you do this to yourself?”)

Sunday night, over my vegetarian pie, all chesnutty and honey-ey, I said: “This is tasty.” “It’s tasty,” I said, “but I’ve had tastier.” “Still,” I said, “it’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a little bacon.”

The last few days have kicked my ass. I’ve been racing towards the finish line on a typesetting and proofreading project, and late this afternoon deposited the massive package at the post office. It is a strange and good feeling to crawl out from under this weight I have been carrying about me. At some point this morning, after the leatherwood honey and banana sandwich but before the very small, very dark coffee, the delusions began. I kept thinking I needed to wrap up my work so I could go down the street for a slice of pizza – from Il Forno. On the Campo dei fiori. In Rome.

I’m telling you. Right then, at that moment – and was this after the honey and banana? after the muesli and yoghurt? – there was nothing surer, nothing more crystal clear, than the knowledge that I would go downstairs, ballerina pumps on slate grey steps, and I would open the door to the cobblestones of vicolo del Cinque. The sun would be out – I could feel it, warm on the back of my neck – and the little No. 125 bus would be coming round the corner.

Right now it feels like someone is inserting, one by tingle-inducing one, long, cold needles into my brain.

I have been forgetting to mention, because they are like the doors in my mind, themselves opening and closing and staying half-open, half-closed, the hidden doors and grates and the anonymous metal gates of the city. Down so many quiet streets, we peeked through so many little doorways at so many hands at work. Behind smudged glass fronts or curving wooden doors propped open, behind steel curtains pulled up halfway, they formed, shaped, ground, built. There was a chair in the making, a lampshade, a chair again, maybe a car, and, once, loaves of bread: one baker sat for a smoke outside while another stood in a fine cloud of flour.

At dusk one day, Olive took me by the hand. “Come-come,” he said, and we ran across the tram lines on via Trastevere. Via della Luce seemed the narrowest and crookedest of narrow, crooked streets – I know now it wasn’t, but at the time the light was fading fast and I had no idea but for the hand in a hand. I navigated blue-grey pumps across cobblestones higgledy piggledy till we saw the pool of light by the Innocenti biscuit shop. There were fruit pies in the window, a pile of palmiers, a handwritten sign on orange card that read Tramezzinni su ordinazione; then, further in, the biscuits heaped high – trays upon silver trays of chocolate-dipped, almond-dotted, sugar-sprinkled, cherry-centred.

It smelt of sweetness and butter.

The biscuit lady wrapped a slice of chocolate-chip cake in a sheet of kitchen paper and sent us off with a smile and a paper sack of biscotti.

Afternoons in Rome, often, hungry-like, we picked and pecked at snacks on the go. We sat on steps and benches. We perched on handrails. From Il Fornaio one day, a hop and a skip down from the Campo dei fiori, we got mortadella sandwiches, salty and meaty and wrapped in brown waxed paper. We sat by the fountain with our backs to the sun, and the water mist on our arms. We couldn’t move for happiness. We carried Giolitti cones after, pink and green and blackberry purple.



We walked in the gardens, we laughed at the little dogs, we did everything and nothing at the same time. I must have stopped in every stationery shop we saw, drawn in by the delicate, gold-engraved notecards and the cardboard marionette theatres – so many knights and jesters, so many princesses hanging from fine, white threads.

One afternoon on via Giulia, I remember, there was the smell of baking in the street. A woman bent at the waist and put her eye to the crack between uneven doors. We looked in at the antique stores, their brass lamps and handsome trunks and glassy-eyed dolls, and we walked under the arch with the lush, green vines hanging low. We crossed the ponte Sisto as, just ahead of us, a flock of small birds swooped in the wind. At home, we napped under white sheets while the sound of an accordion floated up from the lane. “Why,” Olive said, and he was dozy, and I was dozy, “is someone playing the theme from ‘The Godfather’?” The curtain was a gauzy white, knotted in the middle to keep from sweeping the floor. We woke after sundown, in time for prosecco and saladini at a table outside. The night unfurled and spread her wings around us.

Just days into Rome, Trastevere was ours already. The nighttime murmurs from below our window on vicolo del Cinque were our lullaby; in the morning we turned right and and then left for the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, where already the sun reflected off ochre walls waking, too.



Mornings, we sat in the sun with a cappuccino and a croissant, fuel enough to power walks through the city. We walked, oh, how we walked, we walked till my feet tingled; north to the Castel Sant’Angelo for the view of the city till the edge of the sky; south to the crap market of crap at Porta Portese; east to the ruins – the silent stones of the Forum, and the Colosseum, where the gladiators smoked and chatted on their mobile phones.



We ducked scooters and flattened ourselves against the walls when the cars came down the narrow lanes; and at the end of every street, it seemed, there was something old and crumbly and stately and elegant – a house, a wall, an arch, a corner. A serene Madonna behind dusty glass.



I am intrigued by intrigues, so I tell you: There were secrets, too, everywhere, and for the picking; Rome is a field full of flower secrets blooming. ’Round the corner from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, we’d stopped in at a caffè for tea and a chocolate biscuit. We stood at the bar with the men in black suits, all of us reflected in a wide, gilt-framed mirror hanging behind the bartender. Behind us, a woman – she was proper and straight-backed; she was white-haired and robed in swathes of black – was arguing, quite loudly, with her companion, a tall man with a small hunch about the shoulders. He might have worn glasses. He was calm and clipped British to her indignant American, and Olive said later that he was a priest. He explained, the man did, that he was in a difficult position, and the woman, pulling her cape around her tighter in a precise movement, said: “I don’t wonder.” Her eyes were wide and fierce, and her forehead high. He held a small porcelain cup, empty but for its coffee rim. “Put your coffee down, William,” she said, later, snappishly, and they left up the stars to the back.

Inside the gallery, later, we whispered on wood floors while medieval eyes watched. The candelabras had been lit. I seem to remember golden paintings. From inside I heard the seagulls calling down silent hallways.

A couple of days before we left for Rome, we were poking around in a great map bookshop I like, and Olive said, “Maybe we need a small dictionary too.” “A dictionary?” I said. “No, no. Between the English and the French we’ll figure it out.” “Anyway,” I said, “you studied Italian, remember? And me too! Six months! Ten years ago!”

That first night in Rome, our pensione lady directed us to the deep brown door down the street, where the tubby chef stood up front by the open stone grill and the spread of meats in a shiny counter. “Il Ciak”, the place was called, and Olive reckoned it was because of the sound of the glinty steel chopper cutting through bone and hitting the thick chopping board. The waitress, she with the black hair and the spectacle frames to match, brought us menus and left us to it.

She stopped by once, to offer a plate of crispy bread, hot off the grill. The toast was glistening with olive oil, and garnished with a whole garlic clove on the tip of a slender toothpick. She stopped by again, to ask what we wanted to drink. “Un bicchiere di acqua e un bicchiere di vino rosso,” Olive said, and, oh!, how her eyes lit up with motherly amusement at our folly. We don’t do glasses, she said, and mimed a bottle: “Una bottiglia?” “OK!” we said, and we were pleased to quench our thirst. She stopped by a third time, then, with a bottle of water and a bottle of wine – a litre and a half of wine in a bottle the size of my head. It was wrapped in twine, and in my mind I saw the ancient Romans swigging from it in their togas. They were jolly, these ancient Romans, because they could speak Italian and could order as much wine as they liked. “Grazie,” we said, because we speak Italian and we are polite.

In between nervous looks at the wine bottle, I sneaked a peek at the menu. There was agnello, which was obviously lamb, and bresaola, which was obviously bresaola. But what was maiale? What was scarmorza? And was there any chance nodino was a Nutella pudding? Where the French porc sounds comfortingly like pork, and where the French veau could, at a squint, be veal refound, here I was adrift in a sea of un-understanding, the waves of my “we’ll figure it out” slap-slap-slapping at the weathered sides of my leaky raft.

“Tomorrow,” Olive said, “I’m not saying it’s the first thing we have to do, but, you know, sometime tomorrow, we will find a small dictionary.”



We’d done okay by the end of five days in Rome, though, by which I mean I’d done okay by the end of five days in Rome. Olive was off and running, his Italian come back by day two, while, me, I smiled a lot and said Grazie like the favoured grandchild. By the end, though, honestly, I’d done okay.

“Totally, I spoke Italian,” I said to CC when we got back to London. “And everything ended in a question mark: ‘Due biglietti? Per, um, il tram?’”

“You sound,” she said, and I knew, over the phone, her eyes were wide and her brow furrowed in amazement at my linguistic skill-diggery, “you sound,” she said, “like Jennie Garth and Donna in Rome.”