March 9, 2007
She was 22-years-old, with deep hazel irises the size of Venus. Her breasts appeared to have been modelled on Easter eggs. Her legs were approximately nine feet long and ended just beneath her perfectly chiselled chin. She wore pointy cowboy boots. With slinky tight-fitting jeans. She smelt like she'd fallen out of a vase of crushed rose petals. And she spoke flawless English in an Italian accent that threatened to destroy my already fragile grip on sanity itself.
All that, dear readers, and she worked at a fucking vineyard.
"Will you marry me - please?" I asked my mirror, later on, when I'd eventually got over the shock of meeting what in a parallel universe would be my perfect partner.
"No, not at all," said my reflection. "And by the way - you'd never get near her."
Still, at least the wine was nice...
*
I'm walking through the airport in Alghero, Sardinia, wondering how actually Italian Italy will actually be. But it appears they have planned for this eventuality, because the espresso bar is just to my right - populated by swarthy gentleman menacingly detailing the next day's Mafiosa killings (I presume) - and, outside, but in view, sits a man on a Lambretta.
Sophia, our guide, and Icaru, the sidekick - a horribly handsome sidekick, by the way, even if he did get referred to by someone who looks a bit like me as an Italian Neil Morrisey (well you have to try, don't you?) - plucked us out of the arrivals queue and took us to La Refrectore, a restaurant, where we had approximately 984 dishes of antipasti, 627 servings of pasta, nine hundred weight of fish courses, a bit of octopus, and enough red wine to fill the Caspian Sea.
I may, possibly, have got a bit drunk.
And gone to my free four star bedroom late.
Then, after a few minutes lying on the floor of the bathroom while the power shower slowly revives my basic life capabilities, I'm eating breakfast - juice, fruit, ham, cheese, tea - and then I'm on a minibus, with nine other tired and hungover journalists wishing they'd skipped that last glass of wine the night before.
Then I'm looking at a road that I would only normally expect to see in a car advert. Or a Roger Moore-era Bond movie.
A swift 180 degrees turn reveals this, however:
There is, of course, a point to all this (and believe it or not, Molty, it's not just to piss you off (well, not much, anyway)).
It seems I have to observe, make notes, ask gentle questions, pretend I like fauna and flora and not think constantly about my next free glass of wine.
It seems, also, that the callous Italian bastards want me to walk - walk! - down 684 stone steps, along the edge of a scary cliff, going past this:
And this:
But let me tell you something with a sincerity I am more than aware that I lack at any other time:
When I got to the bottom, to our destination the Grotto, I almost leaked tears of gratitude for the gift that lay before me.
These photographs don't do it any justice at all, and I apologise for that, but this was the day when Zeds saw a dream come true.
The only thing missing in this 75 million-year old cavernous delight of timeless limestone, my friends, was a fucking Batmobile.
So, what else did we do?
We saw churches, a cathedral, lots of bell towers. We went to museums and galleries. We drank espresso and ate gelato (ice cream). And we peered in that grotesque touristy way at things like this Dead Old Italian Priest that I just couldn't help getting a picture of:
We saw an incredible sunset that made me feel good, but empty:
A daytime sun that burned and harmed and warmed:
We had a nineteen course lunch - no joke - on a farm where everything we ate had been grown on-site - including the ricotta, the parma ham, the lentils, the pasta, the three spatched wild boar roasting in the fireplace, and the delicious, zesty oranges that cleared our palette before dessert:
We ate a pecorino cheese which was as smooth as butter, as smelly as shit, and as randy as me. If it hadn't been for the fact that it was daylight, and lunchtime, and there were children nearby, it's very possible indeed that I may have mounted, in something of a sexual frenzy, this tureen of dirty cheesy delight:
We saw delapidated stone huts that people used to live in 3,000 years BC. Big "oh" to that, however, because they were quite extraordinarily dull.
And we drank. God, how we drank.
At the Sella Mosca vineyard, where they produce 23 types of wine - some of which they foolishly thrust into my slightly damp palms and demanded I taste - I saw a wall of wine that, unwittingly, made me kneel down and venerate:
In a museum of religious artefacts - no, I wouldn't recommend it - I saw this rather unpleasant baby's skull, which is supposed to represent Herod's slaughter of the innocents, but to me just represented all that's wrong with religion in general:
In the free time we had, I wandered down streets gazing at simple but implicitly beautiful architecture:
I even found time to take a picture of me (because I know you're dying for one - ahem):
Although I wasn't, erm, feeling very well at the time.
And that was about it, really.
Apart from the bit with the police.
*
"Look," said Zeds, who had a pleasingly red pissed face, to the small, fat, bald and badly-teethed man standing in front of him. "Fuck. Off. Comprende?"
I'd got myself into this state because I was finding myself a tad annoyed at this squalid little beggar poking me in the chest and demanding: "Passporte! Passporte!"
I wasn't even bothered by his almost seven-foot tall friend, apparently a deaf mute, stood behind him. I just wanted him to fuck off, and fuck right off now.
Eventually I walked into the bar, found Icaru with his hand up the skirt of a girl who looked not unlike the tortured souls of my darkest thoughts and with a curious moustache of fine white powder, and asked him to help.
With a squelching noise, his hand was removed, his moustache was wiped away, and out he came.
To explain to the nice man from the immigration police that I was a "journalista" and not, as he had originally thought, a French drug dealer.
Honestly.
These bloody foreigners...
just speak slowly in English.pmsl