a king prawn balti and a bathtub of coffee

I've returned my apartment key, cleared out my files and left Reggio. I know I spent a year there, because they built a bridge



and I have more grey hairs, but all that seems to remain of the year is a few disconnected memories shushing round my brain like receipts in a shoebox. Weekends away in Bergamo and Cinque Terre and the Venice Lido, poverty-struck weekends in the park with cards and a frisbee, my apartment terrace covered in snow. My last week was pethadine-peaceful. A strange bliss descended, like that cherub had arrived after all. The pizza shop people toasted me for a lucky journey, gave me their address and asked for a postcard. Two of the teachers I went to Lake Orta with gave me an album of some of the nicest photos, which threatened to make me cry. I got taken out for nice meals and given thoughtful little presents. It was too hot to sleep for that last week, so I stayed out drinking in the squares or watching old dvds in my friends' better-ventilated apartments. I walked home every night as the pastry chefs were going to work--Mamma, che calda, I'm just off to heat myself up a little more in front of a sodding pastry oven!--then got up a few hours later to do full days at work. By the time I left I was so tired I looked like I'd been punched in the face, but that suited me ok.

On Friday morning, a few hours before my flight, I went to clear out my bank account. The teller said that my salary hadn't been paid in yet, that my landlord's cheque for the apartment deposit hadn't cleared, and that I was 500 euro overdrawn. I cried for an embarrassing length of time while trying to do sums on my mobile phone calculator and apologising for my incoherent state. Then my special banker, the friend of my boss' who set up the account, came back in from my coffee break, sat me down and promised to sort it out. He made a couple of phone calls, received a fax from somewhere, managed to clear my landlord's cheque. Then he made another phone call. He wrote a very large sum of money on a post-it note and traced over and over it meditatively as he talked to someone--I was too tired and upset to care who. I wondered vaguely if it was some extra debt I hadn't factored in. He hung up the phone, smiled, and explained that in Italy you get an extra month's wages in your pay cheque when you leave a job. Hadn't anybody told me about that? That fat sum had a plus in front of it, and it was mine.

The soundtrack in the car on the way back from the bank? The Streets: A Grand Don't Come For Free.

Now I'm set up in a rather lush college dorm room in Mile End, since the campus is being used for a summer school. I tested the kids today, I start teaching them tomorrow. They're adorable. According to their oral test, they all like Shakira and 50 Cent, and if they could meet Bob Marley, they would ask him where he gets the inspiration for his songs, and they are sad because people say he is all about the marijuana cigarettes, but it is not true, this thing.

I was free on Saturday afternoon so I walked around Soho and shopped for a birthday present for Lily (ok, her birthday was in February. Better late than never) and watched the England game through the windows and doorways of the pubs, and I had a ludicrously large and tremendously hot British coffee in a cafe full of Italians. I dawdled over the coffee, watched the football on the telly and eavesdropped with all my soul, because I've been away for three whole days and I have a chamois-thirst for that bobbly, bubbly, babytalky language and it hurts to be able to understand everybody I pass in the street. And on Sunday I went for a curry in Brick Lane with the Lilster and a teacher from the summer school and heard all her news, and went home to my little room, and it's--all--fine------another change, another strange room, and it's all better than fine.