Lucy’s Latest

To the oddly named Palazzo Papafava (“scoffbean”) for Her Majesty's Jubilee, Venetian-style (i.e prosecco – and in carefree abundance – rather than Babycham). Quite why we are celebrating the glorious event at this time of year your faithful correspondent is too...

So here we are again, sotto Natale, or “under Christmas”, as they sat in these parts. Now, Lucy knows that most, if not all, of you are busily stuffing those stockings with tasteful blue 'Forchette Veneziane' (still time to order, for those with the slows), and she...

Those of you who print out the biographical snippets Lucy lets fall in the hope of fleshing out (so to speak – not a spare pound on her) a 'nuanced' portrait will no doubt remember she had a little medical scare the summer before last after a jaunt in the Alcarrìa....

Now I have to say, to Lucy a book is a book, a convenient way of carrying words around, and not a fetish. But my brother Tom ('Hamish' to the family, for reasons lost in the Highland mists) has for many moons been what he is pleased to call an 'antiquarian...

OBITUARY. So, Celia Wembley is with us no more. As it happens, I have some slight connection with CW, who came late to art, having been previously, well into her fifties, games mistress at my school (before my time of course). It came about in this wise. Our...

Couldn't have come at a worse time: beach weather pouring in with the prevailing wind, and Lucy's ballooned. In the normal way of things Chris (what with all that rowing to Trieste and back to work up an appetite for lunch) is lean, John F. – shall we say – less so,...

Whichever day it was designated last week for the celebration of 150 years since The Unification, I've already forgotten, so damp a squib it sputtered. A few plasticky tricolori hanging limply from the odd balcony, northern separatists going about with long...

For all my pale and delicate skin-tones and moderate aversion to the rays of Ra, I like this time of year. The lads are away – Chris in London, John-F in Poland, one supposes (he's become a bit strange and secretive with the bus-pass years approaching) – and Lucy left...

Thursday evening and Lucy was one of 29 at Davide and Luisa De Franceschi's excellent Trattoria 'Alle due Gondolette' on the Fondamenta delle Capuzine for the launch of Hugh Tolhurst's 'All Out of Space-Junk', no.19 in San Marco Press's ongoing whizz-bang pamphlet...

I know you will all have been waiting for an official San Marco pronouncement on the Oxford Poetry Chair. The thing about this piece of furniture is that it needs to be occupied by some pretty weighty buttocks, which being so, Geoffrey Hill was as things turned out...

It's a sad truth to enunciate in these liberated times, but the fact is that even, perhaps especially, educated chaps are liable to think of a blonde as a couple of protuberancies in a t-shirt, or out of one, if they are hot (I use the word advisedly) from Damiano...