Focus? what, both of us?

In Prtofino this morning I came across a couple of Swedish girls, who were trying to get someone to take a photo of them with their own cameras, the sort of thing that happens every day at tourist traps. After the guy had fiddled around a bit, one said to the other “Vot is he trying to do?” her friend said “He is trying to focus”. Her friend looked back and said “vot, both of us?” So that s got todays column off to a poor start.

So we left PortoFino, which is a very pretty and beautifully kept tourist trap, having stayed in the worst room at the Nazionale Hotel, right on the port front, a mere snip at 200 Euros, for a room with a view of air conditioning machines and the sky impossible to see from any vantage point in the room. In fact the room had no vantage points at all unless you are a lover of pot holing, or just like the idea of living in a cave. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the consumption levels earlier in the evening of pino grigio, when all the air con machines were functioning fully at 1am, that nice lady decorator decided to fetch the poor hotel duty manager and insist that he stood in our bedroom to hear what she considered to be a cacophony created by said machines. Perhaps opening the window onto the subterranean terrace exacerbated the problem, I am not sure, all I can be certain of  is that I know this, because I was sleeping soundly until the moment she burst back into our cave and commenced explaining her complaint to the poor Italian sop, who spoke no English, whom she had dragged up from the front desk by his ear. At the moment, I was awoken by a mixture of shrieking hysterics from her and whimpering from the hotel official. I decided to feign sleep otherwise we would have been moved to a junior suite costing twice as much. Of course after much calming from the luckily quite good-looking, but clearly afraid, Italian lick spittle, she settled down and slept soundly shortly thereafter for a full 8 hours. Perhaps the thrill of the chase (of a lost cause) was sufficient to lull her into sleepiness. Nothing however was mentioned in the morning, so once again a storm in a teacup.

Portofino is a tiny village, a little like an Italian version of Clovelly in Cornwall, but warmer dryer and considerably fuller of pasta. It is close to a pit of a town called Genoa, which from Nice is reached by a motorway journey of less than 3 hours, but marred by having to negotiate over 100 tunnels en route, which were not enjoyed in the Merc with the top down. My picture today was taken on the way up to the fabulous Castello Brown, clearly named after Wayne Brown from FR2day, well they charged us 5 Euros to get in, so there was some similarity. We rang him whilst outside to see if we could get mates rates, but he did not take the call, so we had to full price.

Portofine, viewed from the walk up to Castello Browm, the

We arrived in Venice, in time for an early evening beer, before our lovely Norwegian gay friends, collectively knowing as Bang and Olafson arrived, before a quiet evening to explore the wine stocks of Italy, that nice lady decorator determined to terrorise some more Italian waiters. Elton John’s new lyrics to “Candle In The Wind” in celebration of the demise of Bin Laden was discussed, apparently, “sandals in the bin” is expected to be a big hit, especially in America.

Chris France