A little summer holiday update…
So excited to learn in this week’s magazine that Richard Osman has a new fiction book out, I’m a big fan. I chomped through his last 4 on various holidays and loved every page turned. If you’ve not read any of them, treat yourself, great characters all with colourful back stories and by the time you get to the last book ‘The Last Devil Too Die’ they will be your friends. I wish I had time to read more. It’s so relaxing and probably the only time, outside of a good film, I truly switch off. My mother always had her head in a book and as children who didn’t grow up with 24-hour TV so did we all, I don’t think there’s an Enid Blyton I’ve not read. Darrell Rivers at Mallory Towers was my favourite and when turfing out my parents’ home before selling it there in the garage was the whole well-loved dog-eared series. I sentimentally kept a few and donated the rest to a charity, although who would read them now, I’m not quite sure.
Throwing my hat into the ring re eggs and coffee love them both. I have an egg, sometimes two a day and love with a passion good freshly ground coffee. Generally, I take my double espresso black and enjoy the whole theatre of creating dark aromatic beans into a cup of coffee. The practice takes place in our kitchen at ‘The Altar of Coffee’ an area dedicated to a rather heavy Italian machine called La Marzocco. A Barista called Daisy came as part of the installation, how nice I thought and on arrival day I allotted 30 mins in my head for her to explain how everything works. I’ve had coffee machines before and spent enough time in my local Costa Coffee to know the routine.
3 hours later which included a PowerPoint explanation she was still with us, and I was hooked by her passion and knowledge. I won’t bore you, but I can now look at a bean work out the oil quantity and change the grind to suit the time it takes for the machine to express its content into my cup within 26 seconds obviously while my 4-minute egg in boiling away!!
I’m writing to you from Naples. Hell couldn’t be hotter and only the clinically insane visit this city in August, but Mark wanted to come, so here we are. Never have I visited a city with such stunning buildings and history damaged by tourism and locals who love nothing better than to get their hands on an aerosol and show the world why they failed CSE art. I hate random graffiti with a passion, it appears in most cities but seldom on a scale like Naples. The man to blame is Erik Rotheim a Norwegians chemical engineer who in 1926 invented the aerosol spray can. Little did he know at the time in the wrong hands it would create such havoc and costly destruction. If only offenders could be made to scrub off their artwork they might think twice about doing it again, or better still outside of ‘trade’ prohibit sales. Off to stay in a Monastery on the island of Ischia tomorrow where I’m hoping there will be no sign of Erik’s little tin bottle.