Thursday 8 January 2009

NO PLACE LIKE... er... WHERE?

Ah, well, as Sam Gamgee famously remarked, "I'm back..."

Is there, I wonder, any more unsettling experience than returning from a time away - especially in a Never Never Land like Venice - to the uncompromising facts of How Things Really Are?

Dorothy Gale may have come to the conclusion that there's "No place like home..." and preferred the dreary, monochrome world of tornado-torn Kansas to the gloriously eccentric Technicolor splendour of Oz, but - frankly - I think she was plain daft!

Anyway, here we are: back in our cold, un-centrally heated flat and facing a yawning vacuum of a year ahead that waits to be be filled, in my case, with hospital appointments (starting this very afternoon - oh joy!) and which, as yet, is entirely devoid of any prospects of work...

Still, we've some great memories of our time away, many captured on camera, such as our last walk across Piazza San Marco, the night before last. It was a scene rarely witnessed by the tourist: the great square absent of those normally ever-thronging hordes who - in a month's time - will be back for Carnevale!

In the meanwhile, St Mark, his fellow saints and their flocks of guarding angels - along with most of the rest of Venice - takes a short, but well-earned, winter nap...


Image: © David Weeks, 2009

3 comments:

Andy Latham said...

Well when you are talking about Britain, there certainly is no place like home....and thank god, for the sake of the Earth, that it's the case!!

Welcome back Brian!

Brian Sibley said...

Is that the sound of you jingling your jingoism, Mr Latham? ;-)

Andy Latham said...

Patriotic to the last, that's me!