Lucy’s Latest

Jubilee

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...

A Christmas Pud

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...

Knox Knox

Knox Knox

Many of you who do not have the good fortune to live in this happy land of Justice and Probity have been pressing Lucy on her opinion of the Amanda Knox trial. Well, as behoves a frequently distressed damsel with any sort of sisterly feeling, she has been firmly in...

Basingstoke and Reprints

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....

When a book is still a book

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...

Addio Celia Wembley

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...

Lucious Lucy

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,...

Saving the date(s)

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...

Here come the hominoids.

Here come the hominoids.

Now here's a funny thing. It seems to Lucy that in all her years in this glittery city she must always have been away at this season, visiting a rackety aunt in Kirkaldy or some such excursion. Because, although she lives quite near the Ghetto (no, she's not going to...

Creeping past Carnevale

Creeping past Carnevale

One of the signs of creeping age – not that senescence and Lucy's untarnished creamy skin-tints are concepts that readily share a tandem – is the way Grandpa Time fast-forwards on you. It seems but yesterday we were airborne and Ireland-bound (the excellent Hampton...

Trying to snow.

Trying to snow.

The prosecco corks it seems to have hardly stopped popping to welcome in a New Year we are promised on all sides will be grimmer than the last, and already it's February. And arctic. The coldest end of January since the previous coldest end of January. Yesterday...

Around the Alcarria

Around the Alcarria

Of course, I should have known that ending a message with 'a bientôt' was asking for trouble. Four months have passed in the blink, it seems, of an eye. The first of them was a well deserved jaunt round the Alcarria, the quid-pro-quo of holding the bastion in the...

Lucy Minds the Summer Fort

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...

All Out of Space-Junk

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...

Oxford Poetry Chair

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...

Lucy Being Serious (for once)

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...