Deep fried balls

Hello everyone,

It's me. I'm back from Italy, slightly pudgier and sporting rather weird tan marks where I decided to cleverly wipe my legs with sunscreen, kind of in a 'I've just washed my hands after going to the toilet' way.

It's always hard talking about a holiday after it has happened. Naturally people ask how it was. My conversations usually go like this:

'How was your holiday?'

'Yeah it was good thanks?' (this is the point where I make a note that they may or may not want me to expand on this)

So let's pretend you're interested in my holiday and I'll pretend like I'm good at building a cohesive and interesting story in my head that can then be filtered down and out of my mouth.

Rome is one of those places that absolutely drips with history. Around every corner, even under every footpath, history smacks you in the face or is waiting to smack you in the face if they ever get around to excavating more of it. If Paris were a woman, she would be the girl next door, if Rome were a woman, she would be a dirty blonde that probably wasn't wearing any undies.

Naples is intimidating at first. But after the initial paranoia that everyone is a pickpocket, it's got one hell of a personality. Sure, it's not as pretty as its neighbours but you come to realise that it's the slightly fat guy who has a great personality that you learn to love and who bizarrely has a rather large shoe collection on every street corner.

And then there's Pompeii, my childhood dream. I've nerdily been wanting to go there since 1992 after doing a talk where I was encouraged by my mother to dress up in Roman garb and bring a vile of sulphur for everyone to smell for dramatic effect. Truthfully, I'm lucky I didn't get beaten up for being such a brown noser. Regardless of my lack of 90's cool that I'm still waiting for, Pompeii was amazing. I prepared myself to be disappointed but I didn't have to worry about facing such lows because it was nothing but a historical high. Seriously, how can you not be thrilled by walking through a city preserved for thousands of years? And it had a brothel! You could choose your sexual positions by pointing to a picture above the door - genius! I inhaled history that day. INHALED IT. Dreams were made.

Sorrento's highlight was the locally caught fish I ate for dinner, seaside, around the corner from all the tourists.

Capri was ruined by a little something I like to call God's Piss (I just made that up actually) otherwise called rain. The good thing to come out of Capri was a fantastic in room picnic with marinated aubergine and getting to lesson 45 of French with Michel Thomas.

Sicily was not quite what I expected. But if you want to eat some amazing pizza and risotto balls, go to Chefalu on the north coast. It's a cute town with a 7/10 beach, burning sunsets and great food.

Can I tell I'm getting bored of typing?

Second wind.

Holidays are great in the fact that you want to eat everything in sight. Is 1030am too early for gelati? Hell no, have two. Holidays are not so great that after 12 days of pastries for breakfast, even the thought of custard filling only gets half an ooh. But having said, I'm definitely not complaining. Deep fried risotto balls so yummy that they stop you talking for a good two minutes. And Sicilian pizza is mind blowing - especially when it's for breakfast. Equally as delicious are crunchy filo pastry parcels filled with orange zest and ricotta.

Tired now.

Ciao.