Two and half years ago, I took myself off on an adventure:
It’s something I’d longed to do since I’d last been there thirty years ago, studying the history, the architecture, the language. Do you know that feeling? You go to a new place, and it stays with you. And that was it, pure and simple: Venice gets under your skin, and stays there. You can’t quite shake it out. Like most post-holiday feelings, you expect the feeling to go away. But some places refuse to budge. Every time you see a photo of the city, you feel as if you’ve left a bit of yourself there. Or that a bit of it has got inside you. Both.
I guess this new adventure has its origins back in 2020, when photos of empty squares and silent alleys would appear, reminding us that the world was still out there as we sat wondering what everyone else was doing, what was going on beyond our confines. It reminded me that Venice was still there, crumbling, but there.
A couple of years later, whilst I was starting to put together The Gardening Mind here on Substack, those quiet alleyways were still nibbling away at my attention. I’d succeeded in wrestling them to a temporary quiet, but they never stayed quiet for long, and eventually I gave in. I was going to go - so I did. Never having been one to question why I shouldn’t do something until I’m actually in the middle of that thing and wondering how on earth I got to that point, setting this plan in motion was actually easier than you’d think. The dogsitter was booked, I found a rental flat going cheap, I packed in all the client visits I needed to do and arranged all the meetings I needed to have thanks to Zoom. I found a flight and I brought myself out to Venice for five weeks of …
