I suppose you're wondering what the point of this email is. Well, I wouldn't worry too much. It's partly to assuage my guilt at not having written enough emails, partly to handle the task of writing to lots of you and still leaving me time enough to do it regularly, but mostly it's because of Garrison Keillor. Sorry to shatter any illusions, but Lake Woebegon has convinced me of the validity of writing pretty pointless narrative emails. It's kind of a roundabout argument, but it's there somewhere.
Most of you know I went to Italy (and this is really an opportunity for me to, with due modesty and without a hint of smugness, that I went to Italy for ten days although four of them were spent travelling, but still, the fact remains that I went there). Anyway, long pointless bracketed asides over and done with, there you have it. There I went. It's kind of strange, since I suppose ever since I got to Reading and for ages before that I've tried to paint myself as a cosmopolitan New Man, a Man Of Experience, and actually I'd never been further than Paris, (though twice) with my School when I was 11 and when I was 12. And, it must be admitted, the most French I spoke was probably when I bought a French translation of a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles comic. So there I am. Found out. And found put I was, since we went over to France on Le Shuttle, and I was grinning like a small child the whole way. I must have looked very silly. And worse, the train is essentially the epitomy of 2001 era SF spaceships.
The damn thing looks like a dirty great spaceship. It's big and cavernous and when you go in there are these great doors that close off the edges of the carriage and these great big shutters that seal off each carriage, because each carriage is sealed to (presumably) prevent fire. You get one coach per carriage, and the doors that close off your carriage have little doors in so you can get to the other carriages. Since each carriage has its own doors there is a space between the doors of two carriages joined together. This is instantly recognisable to Space Cadets the world over - an Airlock. You even have a little button to press that lights up and does some kind of pressurise/depressurise thing. This is cool. I expected to start floating in zero G, like I think they did in an advert for Le Shuttle ages ago. Anyway, the point was (I think), that I managed to shatter any cosmopolitan veneer I had applied to myself beyond all hope of repair, pronouncing Italian road signs on the Autostrada and using an entire film on the passage through the Alps. The Italian Job had just started playing on the coach video at the time. On that trip I managed to conclusively prove that you can order at the bread shop by pointing and nodding and still look like a tourist trying to impress with their language skills. I would write about the rest of the trip but that would be insufferably self-indulgent, so I won't. Be warned, the slides come back tomorrow and if anyone is anywhere near my house when they arrive they will be subjected to a slideshow.
Ciao
Matt