From the archives

I bumped into this email I sent in 2010 when I was last in my now-gone apartment in Hyéres, France and made a trip to Italy.

My toilet is the shower or else my shower’s in the toilet. I’m not sure which. It is very messy. One needs to put one’s towels somewhere where they can’t get wet or one will be drying off with wet towels, I’ve discovered. And what’s with these towels in Italy? They are like table clothes. And so is my blanket. Do you think this is something I can blame on the pope?

I drove to Italy yesterday from my apartment in France, the 2 hours in France was a leisurely trip along the Mediterranean and then the second you get into Italy everyone is driving 180 miles an hour and zooming around you like hornets. I was driving a mind-numbingly fast (to me) 150 Km and I had Smartcars, which are literally just half of a real car with teeny wheels, buzzing around me like I was standing still. Four hours of death-grip-on-my-steering-wheel later I arrived in Lucca and painfully slowly progressed through what would seem to be completely impassible alleys in a warren of tiny passages to get to my hotel. The good news is that the Italians are not like the French. They are all perfectly friendly, broken Italian? No problem we can talk half French, half English, half Yiddish . . . we’ll get through it!! Sooooooo not French.

So far the best thing is I’ve seen is the uncorrupted remains of St Zita. Except that they look pretty corrupted to me. I mean, if she were walking around like that people would be REALLY concerned. She’s a saint because she’s a virgin is all I could find out. This leaves pretty much everyone I know out of the running, in this category anyway. And why, do you suppose, are there no men who are just saints because they are virgins?