f & oats 24-hour party people jaunt

well. hard to believe but it's taken 5 years for jackson and (captain esquire) oats to go on any kind of road trip together.
the result, ladies and gents, was a triumph.
respectful of each other's shared love for SILENCE they read on the train until f's sobbing sniffs/loud wailing on reading the closing passages of On Chesil Beach shook oats from her concentration and elicited an indulgent chortle.
i do like a good weep, i say....i knoooooooow, oats responds.

on a train. with a good book. what more can one ask for?
alas i finished the book too soon and started to be a pest.


on arrival to the rather charming ferrara, a city much loved by f who obsessed over it for years on seeing the vaguely incestuous giardino dei finzi contini, we peg it to our family-run b&b that was unexpectedly spacious, cheap, cheerful with charming details and beamed ceilings and run by a pair of distracted kooks that had to be gently reminded to charge us for the night.
on hearing the dialect of her native lands, flavia's accent mutates quite rapidly. much to the bemusement of oats.
there is, funnily enough, a reason we find ourselves in this one-horse town....

it's arcade fire's only gig in Italy and the setting couldn't be more stunning. the backdrop: a castle. the ground: cobblestones. the audience: scant and clueless. the band: rocking

i took dreadful photos. this short video was all i could muster before giving in, with reckless abandon, to the organ and the fiddles.




we rapidly gave up our plan A: stalk the band.
and instead conked out for 12 hours.

on awakening, i was a bit dozy and apparently moisturized my face with toothpaste not cream. mmm yes... nothing to see. moving it along..
we dashed for a quick coffee. the locals offered us an inviting absinthe brew instead. we also stuffed our faces with a variety of tortelli/tortelloni/tortellacci and (in my case) lard. delish.
on our return we had a quick stop-off in the city of my birth and f took oats on a neck-breaking speedy gonzalez tour of the city in under an hour while incoherently spouting irrelevant childhood reminisces. and slurping the obligatory gelato with added sound effects to mark the moment.
bologna has come under some harsh criticism of late. it's become a dump, they say. it's provincial, they say. well, while i wouldn't live there, but it's definitely not a dump and even if it was, it's still my dump, so back off. and as for provincial. well. the world is provincial. what are we going to do? move to mars? bowie said there's life there.



the hottest Neptune this side of the planet. gimme some...