1. My name is anna (mi chiamo anna)
2. My health is good, thank you for asking.
3. Your name is Daniella, and you live in Sienna
4. It is of great importance to me that my hotel room is en-suite.
5. These above. And several other basic Italian phrases.You see, I’ve had the chance to start using the Learn Italian! kit I got for Christmas. According to the blurb at the beginning of the CD, I should use the CD whenever possible, while relaxing, driving, or gardening. So you can expect me to be adding the “Learn to Drive!”, the “Learn to like Gardening!” and the “Learn to Relax. I Said Relax!” CDs on my Amazon wishlist. Otherwise I don’t know when I’m going to be able to practice.
6. I like extremely rural areas, but would like them more if they had some kind of public transport system. Underground Stations for example. That would be great. Then they’d be miles and miles from anywhere, and therefore retain that rural’thing, but not be so much of a pain in the arse to get to. Christ, I really am a city girl. What am I doing here?
7. I have the best bladder control of anyone I know.
8. My hair looks at its best the third and fourth day after washing. After that it looks like a shrink-wrapped cycle helmet.
9. Bunnies nauseate me
10. Or rather, specifically, bunnies when assuming the form of road-kill, nauseate me.
11. More specifically still, Bunnies when assuming the form of road-kill and firmly under my left boot, nauseate me.
12. Whacking seven shades of shit out of a shed is good for the soul. Assuming that that shed needs whacking. If you’re just whacking a perfectly good shed, that probably counts as bad karma. Especially if it’s not your shed.
13. I still don’t like kidney beans. I’ve checked, and they’re still horrible.
14. Kicking puppies is VERY frowned upon in polite society. I didn’t learn this through experience, please understand, just through conversation. Honestly.
    No, really.
15. It tuns out it wasn’t paranoia after all, the dental community of Britain really are united in a pact to make me cry.
16. Before the third day after washing, my hair looks like cushion stuffing. Shiny Pantene cushion stuffing, but cushion stuffing all the same.
17. Although I’m very fond of my married friends, I have finally stopped wanting to be part of a couple. This is odd news, in these parts. “Anna is very happy to be single (thankyouverymuch). It must be a phase of the moon. Or of the Earth. Or of me. But I’m now good with it.
18. Little sheep are cute. I didn’t just learn this, but I forgot. They’re very cute. Almost enough to make me turn vegetarian. Well, to make me stop eating lamb anyway. For the time being. Until later, when it’ll be alright again.
19. One should never get too excited about the weather, in case it goes away again.
20. My job is worth nothing in the real world, CV-wise. This week I want to work in radio, and have no idea how to pursue it.
21. There is a company that produces Organic Vegan Condoms. So now we know. Vegans can give blow-jobs, after all.
22. There are only so many TV-Sob-Movies you can watch before you want to punch someone.
23. A single kidney bean catapulted from a spoon flies further than fifteen kidney beans catapulted together from the same spoon. Even when heavily coated in sauce. There wasn’t extensive research on this. Just a sample test case. We’ll keep you informed.

I learnt other stuff. Other, more interesting, stuff I can’t remember right now. But I also remember how good sleep tasted, and how good mornings smelt when you’d tasted a good sleep.

Buonanotte. A domani. Ho una gomma a terra. Scusi.

I was reading my journal from the year before last.

There was an episode I’d entirely forgotten and I felt very embarrassed at the time. But when I read it over again, it all suddenly made sense. Or more sense that it did at the time. Which isn’t hard. But I felt suddenly that I could write a thesis on three words drunkenly spoke.

“I am Velcro.”

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Because I’m out of good books to read, completely out.
And because sometimes it’s good to switch your brain off.
And because the body needs sugar. Or saccharine.
And because it’s the only romance I’m likely to see this side of the Coronation.
And it’s my day off, and I’ve finished the newspaper. And I’m bored. And all other excuses you could think of.

That’s why I’m reading cheap romances. That’s why I’m all bound up in the world of Mills and Boon (or whatever they’re called now). That’s why the Should I? Shouldn’t I?… relationship of Melody (young winsome secretary, shiny tawny-red hair and hazel eyes, wronged in love before, typing speed of 158 wpm) and Butch (ex-cowboy, now brash chief executive, with a winsome smile, a piercing gaze, a well-cut suit and a throbbing purple manhood, I should think) has pulled me in.

The plot, if such it can be called, has not quite come into its own as yet. I’m not even sure what the general theme of this one is yet. It’s called Rash Intruder, which leads me to think, depending on the emphasis, that it’s either about someone that rushes into situations quickly, or someone who gets excited by the idea of Thrush.

Last year, just when practically everyone on the island seemed to be falling in love, I found somewhere that was selling these terrible novels cheaply, and bought a dozen, distributing them to any friends whose lives were lacking in romance.

The problem with Mills and Boon, quite frankly, is there’s no sex to them. Two people meet, she naïve and virginal, he worldly and masculine, they dance around each other for a while, have various misunderstandings, petty jealousies and meaningful glances, and then realise what fools they’ve been all along, not realising they were so perfect for one another, at which point they share one world-shaking embrace and get married.

So quite a lot like life then, in many ways. If you discount real life and all of the drunken revelations, people-already-being-married glitches, the realisations of incompatibility six weeks into the relationship, the shagging and the shouting, the silliness, the unpoetic moments of magic, the insecurities, feelings of inadequacy and anything that goes toward making us 3D people.

I had a look to see if there were any more racy ones anywhere, but there weren’t. In the theatre I used to work in, we would have readings of books left in lost property. There’s only one phrase I remember from one of them, just after the main protagonists, Desireé (servant girl) and Lord Tarquin St John Benedict Leo Franklin Ralph Geoffrey Randlington-Yaddayadda-Smythe (posh), had had their wicked way with each other in the stables;

‘He lay back, and sighed, like a warm tiger.’

As opposed to like a cold tiger? How does a warm tiger sigh? Which bit was like the tiger, the lying or the sighing?

Oh, I don’t care anymore. I’m going back to wrap myself in the strong arms and inhale the musky aroma of my teddy bear. And read my terrible book.

Let’s face it, it’s the closest I’m going to get to a shag.
Apart from the dead one I trod on earlier on the beach.
Though it could have been a cormorant.

London—Darlington, July 1987

That’s it, actually. That’s the whole story. She was a very old lady, and she died. The first time I ever travelled by long-distance coach, and an old lady died two feet from my knees.

I was young, and it was the first time I was ever the seat behind death.

I’m not sure how long she was dead before someone noticed. But they did. And they covered her with a blanket until we got to the next services, where they took her off, and we all got back on. I’m not sure what they did with her then. It wasn’t a very good services. Not even a Happy Eater, as far as I remember. Though, of course, at that point she didn’t need a Happy Eater.

It was the last time I travelled by coach for the next thirteen years. And the next time I did, someone masturbated at me.

But that’s another story.

Glasgow—Carlisle

I don’t do it on purpose. I don’t climb on a coach and take a good look around, searching for the most perfect seat—the seat where I’ll be disturbed and irritated most. The seat opposite the masturbating man, behind the heart attack victim, in front of the loudest apple eater in the world, next to the baby that screams for England, and vomits for fun. I don’t sit in these seats on purpose. I don’t do it intentionally.

It just happens. Call it a skill, call it coincidence, call it pure luck. But all the above people exist. And I find them, or they find me. And we sit together. For as long as it takes.

This wasn’t a long journey, but as with every journey I’ve been on in the last couple of weeks, the baby was there. That baby. You know the one I mean. It’s really loud.

When they got on the coach it was whimpering, by the outskirts of Glasgow the whimper was an aggressive moan, and by the time we hit the motorway, the howling was coming along nicely. She can only have been about 19 months, and desperately wanting to crawl around or stumble around the coach as best she could. Because of course you would. But her parents decided this was a bad, bad idea. They wanted her to stay very still, and very quiet. I knew that because they kept telling her so. She did not appreciate their reasoning.

I saw the dad fumbling in a bag at his feet. “Ah,” I thought. “He’ll be getting a dummy.” I was wrong. It was a two-litre bottle of full strength Coke. Which he tipped to his baby’s lips and made soothing noises as she guzzled down at least 12 teaspoons of sugar and Christ knows how much caffeine.

Two minutes later, she was becoming quite painfully restless, desperate to get off her dad’s knee and run around. So, to persuade her to stay still, he’d give her more Coke, which made her want to run around more, which made her cry louder, which led to more Coke.

I turned up my personal stereo as loud as I could bear, but all the same from Glasgow to Carlisle I listened to

1. Ella Fitzgerald, with louis armstrong and the wailing child orchestra
2. Gorillaz, the high pitched keening remix
3. Dean Martin, the bawling years, and
4. Bach’s “screaming really loudly” suite, for string and caffeine-baby quartet.

By the way, back in the wonderful world of my personal stereo, we’ve now come to a compromise — or rather she has come to a compromise, I have nothing whatsoever to do with the mind or inner workings of this machine, I just supply her insatiable battery habit. It’s progress in many ways, because now, she has decided that finally, she will play both sides of the tape with equal verve, without chewing, squealing, or hissy-fitting too much.

Unfortunately, she’s playing both sides of the tape at the same time, one backward, one forward, both at once, which I can’t say adds to the listening pleasure much.

However, looking on the positive side of things, listening to a backward/forward mangled remix of favourite albums, is, in a way:

1. Time saving, and
2. Innovative and experimental and
3. Great value for money. Two sides for the price of one. That sort of thing.

Grumble.

The lady next to me flexed her fingers and breathed deeply. She sighed. She sighed again.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a very nervous flyer.”

“Oh that’s fine. Will you be okay,” I said, even managing to sound worried.

“Yes, I think so, I’m just always thinking an engine is going to fall off or something.”

“Oh!” I said, reassuring chuckle in my voice. “I’m sure that wouldn’t happen.”

“Why not?” She swung round and stared at me. “It did that time I went to Greece!”

…

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Did I mention that while I was in Italy I went to a spirit channeller?
Not sure if thats the correct term. Some one who channels spririts, not like a barman.
Someone who speaks to ghosts.

She was a medium, I suppose.
Well, small to medium, anyway. About 5 foot 4, eight and a half stone, I’d reckon.

But thats not the point right now.

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