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.