Life as usual, with flashbacks.

Hello Possums. Well its great to be home. I’m getting back into the full swing of things in Melbourne. Already I have a couple of MTC plays coming up: The Glass Soldier next week and Virginia Wolf a fortnight after that. A coffee morning at a little local French pastiserie that has only recently been discovered by one of our Talkative Women At The School. You must bring your lap top. There won’t be many people in the coffee shop, we can take it over and have a slide show of your holiday, Bron said. Oh OK, I replied, that’s pretty high tech, but yeah I can do that. What a good idea! (TWATS goes high tech!). And my girlfriend Liz has suggested that we must have another girls night out at our favorite Jazz Club. Oh Yeah! But that’s not all. The Lay back club meets the week after next as well! And this only takes me through until the fourteenth of September.

Parts of our Europe holiday come back to me, depending who I’m talking to or reading. Charlotte took me back to Lucca today. We visited Lucca on the first of many day trips from our villa in the hills above Lastra a Signa outside of Florence. On this particular trip we had representatives from three families to make a party of eleven. We ate a picnic lunch on the grass under some trees on the old town wall and then hired some bikes. The kids were all taken with the idea of tandems and if there were enough in the bike hire, they would all have been riding them. As it was my eldest daughter and her friend ended up on single bikes like me. Every one else rode in tandem. The three youngest children rode tandem with an adult. They had little bikes attached to a larger parent bike and loud little horns to play with. But Rosie and Emma rode a real tandem for the first time and found this a fun challenge.

I rode around the town and took in the graceful romance of the old city. However, my musings were punctuated by the tooting of little horns. I rode ahead at one stage and spun my bike around to capture our group on video as they passed me by. If you listen carefully you will hear Sally and her friend on the horns.

After two laps of the town on bikes, we headed in for gelati. The streets were quiet compared to Rome, and the shop fronts small and quaint. Displayed in the window of a cake store I saw the largest panaforte I have ever seen. The sign underneath it indicated that it could be purchased by the kilo. I occasionally make it at home but always have trouble getting it out of the baking dish. Even the paper gets stuck. I have persevered with the baking because I do love it! They had to drag me away from the window.

We came across a large square, Piazza Napoleone. I took photos of the beautiful medieval building in one corner of the square and then went to have a look at a stage that was being erected in the centre, complete with an impressive array of lighting and banners advertising the concert series. The chairs for the concert were being unloaded and set up. People were on stage setting up. Lucca is the home of Puccini. I therefore assumed that it would be a classical recital of some sort. But no! Quite an impressive line up of modern artists had been organised for a spate of summer evening concerts. The big names included Elton John, George Michael, Nora Jones, Steely Dan and Rikky Martin!!!

I think if Lucca were to be given a star sign it would be Gemini.

That night we returned to our villa, had a swim, cooked a barbeque, enjoyed Chianti Classico from the Wine Shop in Lucca (the best wine shop in Tuscany, according to our guide book) and chatted on for ages after we put the children to bed.

… I wonder if you can get hold of that Chianti in Melbourne.