Who made you this way?

Unfortunately for you, my few and beloved readers, you get to hear the bits about travelling that I don't want to put on the blog my family reads.

So, five people is *too many* for travelling together. Take note all. Two is a good number. Three can be fun. One is awesome for a while. Five no.

Especially when all five are indecisive and timid by nature, and have *exactly* the same manner of trying to express our wishes at the same time as suppressing them, and resent one another in the most gracious manner imaginable, dragging on our way of being like a ball and chain. Boy do I know where I get all my complexes from. We never, never fight, but we probably should. But none of us knows how.

Meanwhile, Italy is lovely. The grapes are ripening splendidly, the sea is impossibly blue and impossibly ancient (in a different way from the ancientness of other seas), and the Siesta is a tremendous concept. Being here, though, confirms what I had suspected: I could never live in a place like this. These sun-drenched, wine-stomping, voluptuous, expressive, gossiping-in-the-streets Mediterranean cultures are not for me. I would like to belong, and be capable of shouting liberally at my neighbours, but I cannot. Give me the North, with its grit and flint and reserve and ugly woollen jumpers, its strange music round the hearth, its beautiful angry metalheads holding their souls together in dingy basements, and all that is not said. Maybe Finland.

Rebecca: What will happen to us and our children?

A time will come when it will be said: Happy are the barren women, the wombs that never gave birth, and the breasts that never gave suck. They will call to the mountains: Fall on us! and to the hills: Cover us! For if these things happen when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?

-Jesus, in the 10-yearly Oberammergau 'Passionsspiele' (which I saw with my family yesterday)

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is out and about in the midday sun
her buttermilk skin gleaming,
hair streaming behind her, graceful as a golden banner on a castle top.
Her dainty bosom is bound in an orange bandanna,
(for the football, you understand)
and her little toosh, draped in a white skirt,
perched coyly on the seat of her upright bike,
is a thing of such perfection that you could break your heart,
just watching it go by.
She rounds the corner, ringing her bell,
scattering tourists who've strayed into the cycle lane.
Her face is serene and composed,
intelligent, thoroughly grounded,
but there is plenty of mischief in her eyes.
You would never think of doing her wrong.
There is something in her smile that says
she won't take no shit.
She is fearless,
heedlessly flashing passers-by
as the wind toys with her skirt.
She hides nothing,
yet at the same time, her depths cannot be guessed.
And almost before you can think,
you are hopping on your bike and following her,
for she has disappeared round a corner,
down a side street you hadn't noticed was there,
and she does look like the sort of person who knows all the right places.
Besides (you note, feeling a little kinky and a lot curious),
you would really rather like to talk to her,
and see where it goes.