A fairy ring of Clitocybe nebularis mushrooms

Dear Readers, as autumn rolls around I find myself becoming nostalgic – this has always been a time of new beginnings for me and this year, as I ease myself into retirement, there have been more changes than usual. But this morning I was remembering one of those moments in my life when magic became not just a word, but a feeling.

We had just moved house, from a tiny two-up, two-down in Stratford to the relatively palatial surroundings of a four-bedroomed house in Seven Kings, in the London Borough of Redbridge. It wasn’t an enormous house, but it was the first time that we’d had not only a bathroom but a shower room as well, and my brother and I got a whole separate room for ourselves, rather than a single room divided by a plyboard ‘wall’ that Dad had constructed. That first night, we huddled together in the middle of the ‘through-lounge’, which felt uncomfortably cavernous after the confined spaces that we were used to. The dog had no doubts, however, running from one end of the lounge to the garden and back again, scuffing up the lawn on every turn and tracking mud across the carpet.

The garden wasn’t enormous either, but it has an ancient apple tree, a bit of lawn, and (to my Dad’s delight) a shed. But we were town dwellers to the core – the first time Mum heard a vixen scream, she was horrified, and stood there with her hands over her ears.

“Make it stop!” she yelled, eyes tight closed. “Someone’s being murdered! Make it stop!”

And then there was the time that my brother put his trousers on only to discover that there was a live bat in them. That was an entertaining twenty minutes.

But the thing that came to mind this morning was when I walked downstairs very early one morning to luxuriate in a long shower before anyone else got up. I looked drowsily out of the window, only to notice something that hadn’t been there the night before.

In the lawn, there was a perfect circle of little white mushrooms, poking their heads through the turf like so many tiny bald men. Some of them were quite well-grown, some of them were barely apparent, but they hadn’t been there the night before, and that was what gave them their singular magic. Like so many fungi they just seemed to appear from nowhere. I wandered out into the half-light  in my dressing gown, and bent down. The fungi seemed to glow, some of them fretted with dew drops, one or two already criss-crossed with slug trails. I still remember the smell of the earth, the silence, and then the faint song of a robin. I was struck by how mysterious the world was, and how little I knew about it. Maybe that was one of the defining moments for me, when I realised that I would be trying to understand the natural world for the rest of my life, and what a privilege it was to be part of it.

A fairy ring in Brisbane, Australia

Nowadays, I realise that a fairy ring is caused by the way that the parts of the fungus that are able to absorb nutrients from the soil, the mycelium, moves out from the centre of the fungus. As the nutrients are exhausted, the mycelium continues to move outwards in all directions. The mushrooms themselves indicate how far the mycelium has travelled from the centre. Some fairy rings can be 33 metres across, and they may become stable over time, with sufficient nutrients present for the fungi not to need to expand any further. I suspect that ‘my’ fairy ring was connected to the roots of the apple tree, which toppled over and died a few years after our arrival. The fairy ring disappeared after that.

As you might expect, there are lots of legends about fairy rings. In the Tyrol, it’s believed that the rings were caused when the curled-up tails of a sleeping dragon scorched the earth so that only toadstools could grow. In the UK it used to be believed that the circles were caused by fairies dancing, and that if a mortal observed them and was drawn into the ring, they would be lost and invisible to the human world, and might even be made to dance until they dropped dead from exhaustion. If this should happen, a person could be released if someone outside threw wild marjoram or thyme into the circle, as the scent of the plant would befuddle the fairies. A stick from a Rowan tree could also be used to help the person out of the ring, and a touch from something made of iron would also do the trick.

An Arthur Rackham illustration from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer NIght’s Dream’

And finally, there is a lovely Welsh legend concerning fairy rings. Welsh people seem to have regarded fairy rings as more benevolent places than folk from other parts of the UK, and in the 13th and 14th centuries, inhabitants of the town of Corwrion apparently watched fairies dancing around a glow worm every Sunday after church in a place called Pen Y Bonc. The humans sometimes joined in the revels, and there is even a rhyme about it:

“With the fairies nimbly dancing round / The glow-worm on the Rising Ground.”

A woodland fairy ring (Photo by By Josimda – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17210235)

While we’re still reminiscing, I was reminded recently of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by Robert Pirsig, which was compulsory reading for us back in the 1970s. It was fundamentally an exploration of the Romantic and Classical ways of looking at the world, comparing the emotional and the rational perspective, and coming to the conclusion (if I remember it correctly) that we needed both. And so we do! And furthermore, the joy of seeing something like a fairy ring, or a jay, or a rainbow, or a hummingbird hawkmoth, is enhanced by understanding something of how it came to be, and how it’s related to the other phenomena that we see around us. That first heartfelt response to something extraordinary is made deeper and more lasting by an appreciation of the connections between it and the rest of the world. That moment of astonishment as a sixteen year-old seeing a fairy ring for the first time is not one jot diminished by understanding how it came to be. Love and knowledge are not mutually incompatible, but form a virtuous circle that raises us higher than just an emotional or scientific response on its own ever can. And if ever we needed our hearts and minds to work together, this is the time.

Dear Readers, apologies for the late arrival of this piece – I got rather carried away with the wonders of Venice and lost track of the date. But here we are again, working through the year with Nature’s Calendar and its 72 micro-seasons, and I’m finding it very thought-provoking.

Jays are a very occasional visitor to my garden, and can usually only be seen if there aren’t many acorns about, and I’ve put out some peanuts.  Like many trees, oaks will produce a huge abundance of acorns in one year, followed by not very much at all for a couple of years, and the birds and squirrels and other animals that rely on them have to adapt.

I’m particularly impressed with this photo of a jay making off with a peanut.

An abundance of acorns in 2022

One way that jays try to even out their food supply is by gathering acorns and caching them, normally in ground with loose soil in open areas where mice and other rodents won’t find them. They have been shown to be very tactical about where and how they bury their stash: if they think they’re being watched by another jay they’ll find somewhere discreet to hide the acorns, and if they know that another jay can hear but not see them, they’ll avoid substrates like gravel that make a noise. Like all members of the crow family, these really are intelligent birds – some would argue that they have a ‘theory of mind’, which means that they can understand what another bird is thinking. This is a high bar for animals to leap over as far as behaviourists are concerned – only a select group of animals are accepted as being able to do this, which includes apes, macaques, parrots, ravens and, interestingly, scrub jays, a species closely related to ‘our’ jay.Of course, when the jays forget where they’ve planted the acorns, the seeds may germinate and turn into the next generation of oak trees, especially if they’ve been deposited away from the shade of their mother trees. Just like the nutcracker jays in Austria, they extend the range of forests and ‘plant’ trees in places that would otherwise remain treeless.

The best site for jays around where I live in East Finchley is definitely St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, where they can be heard screeching and arguing at this time of year, as they fight over the acorns. However, I was lucky enough to see a whole family of jays in East Finchley’s community orchard at Barnwood earlier this year. I get the feeling that there are a lot more of these birds  about than we think, which gives an idea of how secretive they can be.

Fledgling jay in Barnwood

Another interesting study that’s mentioned by Kiera Chapman in Nature’s Calendar investigated the way in which male jays feed their female partners – this is an important part of the way that the couple bond. The pairs of jays were separated and the females put into three groups – one group was just fed on mealworms, one on wax moths, and a third group were fed a mixed diet. The males could observe what the females were being fed. When the pairs were reunited, the males presented the females in the first two groups with the kind of food that they hadn’t previously been eating (so if the female had had a boring old diet of mealworms she’d be offered wax moths, and vice versa). If the male hadn’t been able to see what the female was being fed, the offerings were much more random. Does this mean that the males thought that the females would be bored and wanted to offer them something novel? It’s an intriguing thought, and certainly plays into the argument that jays can intuit what another bird is thinking.

Jay in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

One joy of seeing a jay is how spectacularly brightly coloured it is compared to most crows (and indeed to most British birds). I love the pink-ish feathers (they’re a colour that my Mum would have called ‘ashes of roses’) and that bright turquoise flash on the wing. They are splendid birds, and they certainly brighten up my day. Have you seen many about this year? Let me know!

Jay on an icy roof, December 23rd 2021

Building works for the new EV chargers on Huntingdon Road

Dear Readers, it’s true that wherever you wander, there’s no place like home, so we were very happy to be back in East Finchley, even though it has no canals and there’s not a gondola in sight, in spite of Storm Babet having caused flooding in other parts of the country. Still, there is progress in the form of lots of additional Electric Vehicle chargers being installed at each end of the road, though it’s a pain for pedestrians at the moment, especially anybody with a pram or mobility issues.

Putting in the charging points (which I wrote about previously here) involves digging a trench:

…putting in the individual charging points, which lie flat to the pavement:

and linking them all up to a control box.

It’s a lot of work, but the end result is about a dozen new charging points at each end of the road, which will surely be a good thing, though for many people the link between the outrageous weather north of the border and climate change still seems to be tenuous.

A completed Trojan charging point.

Anyhow, on we go down to Cherry Tree Wood. The Leicester Road bollard is still vertical – this must be a record.

All of the various Virginia Creepers/Russian Vines are bursting into autumnal colour, and very fine they look too.

The sun is so bright that it’s lighting up these seedheads like little lanterns.

And Cherry Tree Wood is looking particularly fine.

A quick trot along the Unadopted Road shows a flowering ivy that is absolutely a buzz with hoverflies and honeybees. How important this plant is for pollinators! On this warmish day I also saw a queen bumblebee that was easily the size of my thumb joint.

The poor Tibetan Cherry tree below wasn’t quite so happy though – it’s oozing resin from multiple places on the trunk. The bark is still beautifully shiny in some places, but in others it’s clearly very damaged.

This is, I think, something called canker disease, and it results when a fungal or bacterial infection starts in damaged wood. Street trees have a terrible time of it, as we’ve seen – they’re weakened by drought or by water saturation, their roots are often cut or squashed, and there always seems to be some twit taking a branch off with the edge of a skip. Pruning at the wrong time of year, or doing it badly, can also set up the conditions for the infection. So I fear for this tree – it looks as if the infection is well advanced, and I doubt if cutting out the damage will leave a viable tree. Apparently oozing resin in cherry trees is so common that it has a name – gummosis. And the resin was used as a form of chewing gum by Native Americans, though I would be a little bit careful as cherry tree bark also contains the precursor chemicals for cyanide. So, this is an interesting phenomenon that I hadn’t noticed before, but I would much rather this little Tibetan Cherry wasn’t quite so ‘fascinating’.

The Mose Flood Barrier (Photo from https://www.designboom.com/architecture/mose-flood-barrier-venice-storm-alex-10-05-2020/)

Dear Readers, there was a sense of impending doom in Venice this morning. We were able to get a whole table to ourselves at the Parlamento coffee bar, just along the canal from where we were staying, and furthermore the chocolate croissants hadn’t sold out. The reason was two fold. First up, there was a vaporetto strike, so lots of people were working from home and hence not grabbing a coffee en route to the University or to the other places round about. But secondly, the first serious Acqua Alta of the year was planned, with the tide forecast to reach 120 cm. At 90 cm Venice gets a bit of flooding, but at 120 cm it starts to get serious in most parts of the city. We were planning our day on the basis that we should be back close to home by lunchtime – it’s true that the highest tide only lasts for an hour or so, but it’s easy to get stuck somewhere, and as today was our last day we were reluctant to be caught out.

So, after refuelling (there’s been a lot of refuelling on this trip) we headed off to the Accademia, to see the St Ursula Cycle of paintings by dear old Carpaccio. Sadly, someone (i.e. me ) hadn’t done their research, as the Carpaccios are actually in an exhibition at the Ducal Palace. Sigh. St Marks always floods the worst as it’s the lowest part of the island, so that was a non-starter. We did get to see ‘The Dream of St Ursula’ though, and it reminded me very much of ‘The Vision of St Augustine’ yesterday – the same light, the same precision, the same air of expectation. I also noticed the small cat at the foot of the bed for the first time. Vittore clearly couldn’t resist sticking in one more detail.

The Dream of St Ursula (Vittore Carpaccio, 1495)

Anyhow, not seeing the whole St Ursula cycle means I’ll have to visit Venice again, which is no bad thing. And there was also this wonderful Veronese (probably my second-favourite Venetian painter). Veronese always seems to give a real sense of what life was like in sixteenth century Venice, and got into a lot of trouble with the painting below. It clearly shows the Last Supper, but the Venetian Inquisition were very unhappy with it. What’s with the dwarves, and the drunken people, and the dogs and cats, and the geezer in the bright red costume who looks like Santa Claus? They asked. This is no fit subject matter for a religious painting. Aha, said Veronese, this is not actually the Last Supper, but a depiction of the Feast at the House of Levi. Fair enough, said the Inquisition, no doubt to everyone’s surprise. And so it has remained. The more I look at it, the more shenanigans I spot. It’s endlessly entertaining, and just busting with life.

Veronese ‘The Feast in the House of Levi (1573)

The dog eyeing up the cat under the table, plus the guy in the red costume on the left.

A jester and a servant boy having an argument over a parrot

And then there’s this stunning painting by Tintoretto – a master was about to have his slave tortured for having the audacity to visit the relics of St Mark on a visit to Venice. St Mark swoops down like a superhero and breaks the instruments of torture, which can be seen at the bottom of the picture. There’s much wish-fulfillment in this for me. If only such things could be destroyed so easily. 

Incidentally, one thing that I love about Venice is the prevalence of terrazzo floors, and the Accademia is full of them – little bits of stone set in cement and then polished. While common in municipal buildings, you can also see these floors in some domestic buildings, and they’re both attractive and easy to maintain and keep clean. Indeed, it’s noted that when a terrazzo floor cracks it’s usually because the surrounding structure has moved, a not-uncommon occurrence in Venice.

Terrazzo floor

And so, as we prepare to wade back home, we hear that the Mose has been activated. This is very exciting. The Mose is the new flood barrier that’s been installed along the edge of the lagoon, and it comprises a number of gates that can be raised from the seabed at three key locations – the entrance to the Lido, Malamocco and Chioggia. The gates are only raised for exceptional combinations of tides and weather events – there’s no chance that Venetians and visitors will have completely dry feet, as the normal spilling-over of the tide on the canals is essential to not only the ecosystem of the lagoon, but also the sewage system (don’t ask). So, at the moment the gates are raised if the expected tide is above 110 cm, which today’s clearly was. So far, the gates have been raised more than 50 times since they started operation in 2020, whereas the expectation was that they would only need to be raised three times per year. The question of whether this will be enough to save Venice from sea-level rise and extreme weather events remains to be seen.

Acqua alta in Venice, Campo Santa Margherita, 2019 (Photo byBy Marco Ober – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94906890)

Dear Readers, the Arsenale in Venice has existed since about 1100, and at the height of Venice’s sea power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was probably the world’s first production line for ships. At its busiest it employed over 20,000 workers, who were divided into teams who made the frame, the hull, the rigging, the sails and the munitions separately and then put the ship together – legend has it that they could construct a battleship in a single day. Dante described the process in his Inferno:

As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their unsound vessels over again
For sail they cannot; and instead thereof
One makes his vessel new, and one recaulks
The ribs of that which many a voyage has made
One hammers at the prow, one at the stern
This one makes oars and that one cordage twists
Another mends the mainsail and the mizzen…

Well, these days the buildings are home to the Venice Bienniale. In ‘even’ years, it’s art, but in ‘odd’ years it’s architecture, so for the first time this year we decided to see what was going on. But first, we had to visit the lions that surround the old entrance to the site. First up is the Piraeus Lion. He was originally sculpted in about 360 BC and was stolen from Piraeus in Greece in 1687 by Venetian commander Francesco Morosini. Morosini was something of a character, who apparently always dressed in red from top to toe, and never went into battle without his cat Nini beside him. Nini is embalmed in the Museo Correr on St Marks Square, with an embalmed mouse between her paws.

Francesco Morosini, sadly without cat (Portrait by Giovanni Carboncino)

Anyhow, the Piraeus lion is covered in runes, apparently inscribed by Scandinavians at some point in the eleventh century (they were probably mercenaries hired by the Byzantines, and they were clearly a long way away from home). Some people just can’t resist a bit of graffiti, clearly.

The Piraeus Lion

Some of the many runes.

Because the runes are so weathered, attempts at translation have been somewhat hindered, but the consensus is that the 1914 translation by Erik Brate is probably the closest to what the runes actually say. So here it is:

They cut him down in the midst of his
forces. But in the harbor the men cut
runes by the sea in memory of Horsi, a
good warrior.
The Swedes set this on the lion.
He went his way with good counsel,
gold he won in his travels.
The warriors cut runes,
hewed them in an ornamental scroll.
Æskell (Áskell) [and others] and
Þorlæifʀ (Þorleifr)
had them well cut, they who lived
in Roslagen. [N. N.] son of [N. N.]
cut these runes.
Ulfʀ (Úlfr) and [N. N.] colored them
in memory of Horsi.
He won gold in his travels.

So there.

There are three other pillaged lions sitting in front of the gates (the winged lion is the symbol of St Mark, the patron saint of Venice), but this one is my favourite. Whenever I see him, it makes me laugh. Lion or dachshund? You decide.

And look at that face.

This is the Delos lion, another statue nicked by Morosini during the wars with the Ottomans in the seventeenth century. This lion probably dates back to the sixth century B.C., and the head was added later, probably after the lion arrived in Venice. Incidentally, Morosini tried to hammer off some of the horses and chariots from the Parthenon but they fell out of the frieze and smashed. Dear oh dear.

Anyhow, finally we get into the Architecture Bienniale itself. Sometimes, the language used to describe what’s going on at these events is basically word salad, and I don’t think that it’s always a problem with translation. But several exhibits really did stand out. One was a very thought provoking piece about a city in Ukraine dating to 4000 B.C, contemporary with Uruk, usually thought to be the first city in the world, but I want to do a whole post on this so I will leave it for now.

The other exhibit was the Slovenian display, which wondered why we didn’t learn more from vernacular architecture about how to conserve energy, adapt to climate change etc. They used some excellent examples. One was the way that, in the past, people would use only part of their homes during the winter rather than the whole thing, sharing their space with animals or additional people, closing down some rooms and using things like hangings and tapestries to lower ceilings and insulate walls. Whenever I see the latest enormous white box that someone has built in Grand Designs, I always think how cold it’s going to be, even with our excellent insulation and fancy glass.

There’s also much to be learned from places in North Africa and the Middle East about adjusting to hot weather – smaller windows on the outside, courtyards with fountains in the centre that stop ‘thermal load’ and keep the living spaces cool. I found myself nodding up and down like one of those plastic doggies that people used to have on the rear windows of their cars. Below are just some of the questions asked, and the answers they came up with from the past. People have always adapted to climatic problems with creativity and intelligence. Why reinvent the wheel? There’s much from other times and other places that could be useful. I always fancied one of those little sleeping cubby holes meself.

Anyhow, this all seemed so sensible to me that I feel quite inspired, and it’s no different from what my parents and grandparents used to do to save money on energy bills. I bet if we thought about there are ways that we could use our homes differently to adapt to how the climate is changing.

And then I went for a walk outside the Arsenale, because I just love all the bits of engineering from previous iterations of the building that are still hanging about. Like this Armstrong-Whitworth crane, for example, which would have been used to loading/unloading ships, and for building ships. It was originally built in Newcastle and is the only one of its kind left anywhere in the world – in fact, it was the subject of a ‘Venice in Peril’ appeal about twenty years ago, which looks to have been completed.

I absolutely love these gigantic oil tanks, which are slowly being repossessed by nature. The one in the middle looks to me as if it has a cartoon face.

There is yet another lion, this time just a head, presumably to tie a ship up to.

And then there are these enormous white hands and arms. As we got the vaporetto home, I noticed that they form an arch. The installation is called ‘Building Bridges’ and it’s by Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn. They were put in place for the 2019 Bienniale, but like his previous installation ‘Support’, which drew attention to rising sea levels in Venice, this one was so popular that it’s still in place. Apparently the six sets of hands symbolise friendship, hope, love, help, faith and wisdom, and we could all do with a bit more of all of those.

‘Support’ by Lorenzo Quinn, created for the 2017 Venice Bienniale

And so, it’s time to head home. We get the vaporetto around the east and north of the island, and walk back home. You don’t have to go far in Venice to find a quiet alleyway or a peaceful unpopulated canal if you keep away from the main Rialto/San Marco/Accademia stretch (though if you only have a few days these are the things that you’re definitely going to want to see). It’s worth sometimes just exploring gently, though. Not all who wander are lost, and in Venice even those who are lost are generally unconcerned.

Dear Readers, I was wondering if we were actually going to get to Venice, following this news on the night before we departed:

‘Seagulls Force Venice’s Marco Polo Airport to Close Briefly‘.

Apparently a gang of about 200 gulls landed on the runway at Marco Polo, forcing the plane carrying the president of the Veneto to be diverted to Trieste. The usual measures to dissuade birds were used (which involve a falconer and an ‘acoustic deterrent’) and eventually the gulls sighed and moved on. Here is one waiting on the Canareggio Canal for someone to pass by with an ice-cream or an unguarded pizza slice, though to be fair this is just a young ‘un, it’s the adults who have learned all the tricks of the trade.

Clearly some restauranteurs along the canal have found the birds annoying, as evidenced by these anti-seagull measures:

And I rather like the way that the ‘seagulls’ dance to the sound of the church bells in the clip below.

Anyhow, our flight was perfectly fine and we arrived in Cannaregio, found our apartment and set out to explore. We usually just spend the first day hanging out and drinking too much coffee, but as this is where John proposed to me back in 2000, we always try to find our way back to the café where he popped the question. In previous years it was no longer a café but a pizzeria, but this time it was back to being a café again, so we had to stop for old times sake. When John  proposed we were seated between two German tourists and a Venetian lady with pink hair and a small white poodle on her lap, and when I said yes everyone applauded, so it will always have a special place in my heart.

And so we headed off to St Marks Square, because it has to be done at least once. They were clearly expecting an Aqua Alta as they had the raised boards out – these are basically trestle tables, just wide enough for people to pass one another, which make getting around Venice (especially on the path to and from St Marks) even more of a pain than it is usually. But nonetheless it is an extraordinary public square, with something spectacular wherever you turn.

A man was selling pigeon food, but I suspected that it would be the gulls who got most of it – the young ones sit on the ground looking pathetic, while the adults keep an eye on the square for anyone not paying attention.

The best time to visit the main sites of Venice (there are so many, but St Marks Square, the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile are probably the most well-known) is definitely first thing in the morning. Having said which, I have never been inside any of these buildings, because the crush is always too much, and I like the smaller, less well-known sites, of which more later this week. But in the meantime, I’d never had a close look at the capitols on the pillars around the Doge’s palace. What are these monkeys doing? I’m sure there’s a story here.

Then we head in the general direction of the School of the Dalmatians (better known as the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni), home to a series of paintings by Carpaccio, probably my favourite Venetian painter. Alas, as we turned the corner a tour group of about 30 people were entering the church, and that’s at least 20 people too many for a comfortable viewing. We’ll be back later in the week for sure, but in the meantime here’s one of my favourites. It shows St Augustine in his study, and while there have been different interpretations, the one that I favour is that it shows St Augustine at the exact moment that his beloved mentor, St Jerome, died – it’s said that a divine light filled the room, which can be seen from the long shadows in the study. What I love most, of course, is the little dog. Carpaccio, as we will see, was a close observer of animals and people, and his paintings are often full of strange creatures and complicated goings on. What I love most about this one is its serenity.

‘The Vision of St Augustine’, Vittore Carpaccio (1502)

And then we head back to Cannaregio via an increasingly confusing set of alleyways and squares. At one point, we head through a covered archway, where a small Italian tour group are gathered. As we wander through, they cry, as one,

“Don’t stand on the red stone!”

Well of course I had to investigate when I got home, and it turns out that this alley way was the turning point in the 1630 outbreak of the plague – it’s said that the disease never got any further than this spot, and therefore it’s very bad luck to step on the red stone. The reason was that a local woman, Giovanna, had a dream in which the Virgin Mary appeared to her and asked for a painting of the Madonna, St Roch and St Sebastian to be painted on the walls of the portico containing the red stone (between Calle Zorzi and Calle della Corte Nova since you ask). After this, the plague dared go no further, and the red stone was placed to indicate where it turned back.

The red stone – photo from https://www.visitvenezia.eu/en/venetianity/tales-of-venice/the-legend-of-the-red-stone-of-venice-

So on we go. Here we have a gas holder. I had no idea that Venice even had gas, but clearly it does.

Of course, in honour of my friend Margaret and her adventures, we had to pay tribute to  the hospital in Venice, right next door to the Basilica Giovanni i Paolo. Because it’s Sunday and services were in progress we weren’t able to go into the Basilica, but I fully intend to light a candle for Margaret, and one for all the other people that I’ve lost over the past few years, which will make for quite a display.

The lion outside the hospital entrance. Most of this archway is trompe d’oeil, though the lion is actually carved in relief.

And by now the water is rising, and it’s definitely time to head home before we get too wet. Plus, it must surely be time for another coffee? You can never have too much coffee in Venice.