Speaker by Various Artists

Re Stevens: I think 'Here Comes My Baby' and 'The First Cut is the Deepest' are really, really great songs. (Those are from his early 'pop star' period, though, so perhaps I don't technically count as a fan.)

I don't expect any sympathy

You've got that right!

do olive stones count as moist or dry?

Moist.

Awfully jealous - spent many a glorious month on the Amalfi Coast in 2005.e
Can I recommend La Tagliata in Montepertuso (above Positano, another brilliant road for your signature experiences) for their "Dinosaura" - the most incredible slab of meat fresh from the animals roaming the steep terraces outside.

I would recommend jumping on "il Pesce Rosso" - the little Red Fish boat - from the wharf at Positano to be dropped off at Da Adolfo, a real "la dolce vita" tiny restaurant and beach where you can have unbelievable mozzarella alla griglia sulla foglia di limone (mozzarella grilled on lemon leaves), but February is probably not the best time for that!

In Amalfi, we have been firmly instructed to sort our rubbish into two categories: moist and dry. This is more perplexing in practice than it appears. I have a question which occurred to my wife and I last night - do olive stones count as moist or dry?

There are plenty of anecdotes around if you just look.

<qquote>My only defence in writing this short post is that the journey home is a time-honoured part of the re-entry process. Almost all Kiwis take, as we are doing, a circuitous and interesting route back.</quote>

I've been there - after the insanity of packing up 20 years of your life and putting some of it in a container, and selling or giving away the rest - the luxury of spending more time getting to NZ than said container is well deserved - I think those who've never done it don't understand just how hard returning from OE after a decade or two is.

Of course in our case we arrived in NZ to discover that a legal battle had broken out between the shipping company and the freight forwarding company and our container was being held hostage ..... with ever mounting storage fees ....

Awfully jealous

...of that Serge boxed set. I looked at it a couple of times but it was well more than 13 Euros.