21st February 2003:     Ishtar walked up the marble steps into the great hall, where the tapestries, light as air, kept the colours as if they were but spun the day before, and the silver and gold upon the walls sang lustrously as they had for a thousand ages. The pillars with their sacred fires burned like the first sun, and she saw through the wide windows that the minarets in the city shimmered resplendently as they always had, and so shall they shine for ever. What a marvellously gilded penance this is, mused Ishtar, as she sat down and made the burnished parrot, gift of the Djinnn, sing its one melody for the millionth time. |

Isolde pined in her cave of green, strumming a maple harp as basilisks skipped over fetid pools. Overhead turquoise clouds roiled against an emerald sky, saffron reptiles winged through curtains of yellowing cypresses, a harpy rained opalescent tears down a mossy tor, and Isolde asked, "O Genie, my one solace, can you not undo this foolish wish, nor relieve its sentence?" and Genie replied, "Every wish is a shadow of the former, for with each I diminish, this decay unseen by men, but which I must keenly feel, and I can no more undo a worked wish than I be master of Time," and Isolde turned to her harp and wept.

Henriette, "I walked from Assisi to Rome, before that I spent three months in a rural convent."
Us, "You WALKED from Assisi to Rome?!?!"
Henriette, "Yes, I know you Japanese are not used to walking, but in Europe this is very common."
Us, "Erm...we're not Japanese... anyway, how long are you spending in Italy?"
Henriette, "Oh, a year or so. I quit my job and sold everything. You?"
Us, "Three weeks... three countries..."
Henriette, incredulously, "Oh!!!! What makes you think you can cover Europe in three weeks!! You can't even finish Rome!!"
Us, "Ehehe... yarr..."
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3rd September 2002:     Isis blew the conch and a jinn of magnificent size emerged, his voice the ringing echoes of dead ages, and this he said, "O Mistress of the Shell, wish and I must obey," and Isis was in great mirth, and answered, "O Jinn and servant, then grant me wishes without number, the first your will for ever to mine," and the jinn bellowed and shrunk, and blew up to fill the sea and sky with his tremendous rage, but the girl had uttered the one dread command, and so was he slave to her for all time. |

28th July 2002:     In the velvet evening of Venice we sat in a plasticky vaporetto and cleaved the muggy canal waters, windows down to let in the occasional splashes that no one minded. Rita, dirty blonde hair dissolving in the melting sky, told us of the fallen aristocrats who were now banished to the upper floors of their watery palazzos. We saw visions through the rare lighted windows: red rooms, a gnarly chandelier dripping from a trompe l'oeil ceiling, a half-empty glass set upon a baroque ledge. Slipping into St. Mark's Square the mist caught us and threw the Doge's Palace into shifting chiaroscuro. Jazzy string quartets cast melodic gauntlets at each other across the shrouded emptiness, startling a lone pigeon to flutter onto one of the frozen bronze horses. Sipping a familiar tea I lost myself to Venice's strange, sunless seduction. |

We took the pale, Il Papiro-frail skin of Florence, held it between gelato-sticky fingers and shook the colourful bits like virile medieval knights out from the stony streets-- an exhibition on Dali, the itinerant soprano drifting on an aria, grass crickets hung from fading stems upon flimsy twigs at twilight. We had a dinner of red dripping steak and glorious butter-parsley sole; spent a rainy afternoon laughing at our ignorance of wines with a coltish salesgirl; clambered onto the ancient edge of the Ponte Vecchio and captured the flat bleach of the summer sun; tapped the green-iron doorknob, set in a whorled-wood door, of our old Florentine B&B apartment. Then the magnificent Florence: the Medici Chambers, the Basilica and Baptistery, the incomparable Uffizi. A day-trip to Pisa, rushing to beat a train strike. The hills of Fiesole in a coach. Scarves and exorbitant coffee, richly-layered slices of cake, fresh with berry tartness. And the gelato shop -- Parche No? Why not?  |

1st July 2002:    Souvlakis in our hands, grease dripping warmly onto our burnt arms and feet aching from the marble of the Acropolis, we were walking down another long stretch of tourist traps when a dim interior, glinting dully with colour, beckoned.
The shop squeezed itself between glass-fronted restaurants, ignored by the chic tanned ladies and red American tourists lugging bags of loofah and Athens 2004 shirts. A column of Evil-eye keychains dangled from a simple whitewashed wall. The proprietor, white-haired and luxuriantly moustached, sat inside reading a dog-eared book of poetry. We glided in.
Baskets! Brown woven baskets full of the most delightful ornaments -- beads of terracotta, blue, black and gold, feathers strung from silvered wires, arabesques of matte gold and snake-circles in glittering piles, heaps and heaps of translucent pastel chips, burnt sierra tubes and Prussian blue flutes, heavy dull wooden oblongs and light twisted spangles of foil, glass-eyes in a million hues of blue-black and uncountable strings, ropes and filaments in every tint of nature – on tabletops, from hooks, behind the counter and spilling over the rough floor. An Aladdin’s trove in the land of Theseus.
Three girls, noses pierced and hair spiked, peered intently into each basket. Hardly noticing us, they poured shimmering streams of tiny translucent globes into their own little trays. A tall, dark man with a hat walked in and let loose his blonde children, who set about to jiggle every basket and grin at each other. The man started debating Greek politics with the proprietor, in heavily accented English. We had stumbled upon a genuine local shop.
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