Fading fast...

The weather god giveth, and the weather god taketh away... After several blissful days of heat and refreshing breezes, the past 48 hours have been oppressive, cloud-filled and, today, saturating. The torrential carwash through which we drove this afternoon would have any normal person battening down the hatches and settling in for the long haul with a good book, but following a cabin-fever induced downturn in my mental state of late (not helped by yesterday's power cut which rendered the DVD player useless in the middle of our Sunday afternoon screening of Guys and Dolls), we knew not just our relationship, but possibly our lives depended on us vacating our apartment today.

Thus it was that we drove approximately 130 kilometres (we're in Europe now, baby - it's got to be metric) - perhaps not immediately impressive as distances go, but given the downpour and the terrain, our circular route took us around five hours, past ancient towns marooned at the end of causeways, through cities destroyed countless times by wars and earthquakes, over a grey lake through which swims the Montenegrin/Albanian border - and back down to our village nestled in the hills of Kotor Bay, via a steep and many-cornered road that I might have described as driving down a small intestine would it not have followed that our destination and humble abode were thus a metaphorical anus.

The scenery throughout our tour was straight out of a/the Bond film: cloud-scraping mountains and lush meadows, hair-raising bends tight against jagged rock faces which suddenly open out onto a weather-beaten Adriatic and a misty horizon. And of course, as in all good Bonds, the driving was tense. Our guidebook warns that Montenegrins "drive fearlessly and with verve. It is best not to call their bluff." Tempted though I was to put our rented Fiesta through its paces, I had to consider my passenger, and instead rarely left second gear.

Tonight we're all dressed up and in Kotor Old Town for a night on the Unesco-protected tiles. Hopefully the sun will get its act together for tomorrow - we've only got two more full days left and there's a distinct possibility that we will return to London the same pale grey shade of two weeks ago. Somehow I doubt my travel insurance covers 'lack of tan'.

Seven days down, six to go...

Halfway through our trip and Simon and I are feeling very out of it - this is, apparently, the longest he has gone without checking his email - ever. We are staying in an apartment on Kotor bay, with beautiful views over the fjord and a nice interior. Unfortunately beneath our balcony, the alleged 'quiet road' is in fact a busy thoroughfare, with continual trucks, cars and motorbikes trying to squeeze through its narrowness. Instead of putting up with the traffic, we've braved the lethal local drivers and total lack of road markings and headed off to the beach most days - the weather god has been smiling on us thus far and we're both turning a pleasing shade of bronze. Today, however, we've come sightseeing in Kotor Old Town itself and dragged ourselves up the fortress walls - 1350 steps that separated the tourist wheat from the chaff. Now back to the apartment for more competitive reading as Simon hourly updates me on how many pages he's covered of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I'm gripped by The Blind Assassin - but would love a ten minute flick through a UK newspaper... Can't even find The Daily Mail. Pah.

Dubrovnik: Stunning, but too many fat people

All's well here on the Dalmatian Coast (as we now know it) - Simon and I arrived in Dubrovnik on Sunday and were slightly perturbed by the light smattering of rain that showered us as we walked from the plane to the terminal building. The weather since our arrival has been changeable but good for sightseeing - I don't miss the oh-so-sexy beads of sweat trickling down the back of my calves that were omnipresent in India.

Dubbers is architecturally stunning and has to be seen to be believed - the shining white marble streets look wet in the night-time lamplight and demand to be photographed. Yesterday we visited a Franciscan monastery complete with 1991 shell hole in its ancient exterior, and then took a walk around the city's 2km circumference walls, with the sea on one side and the gorgeous ramshackle rooves (is that the plural? Really? It looks seriously odd) on the other, satellite dishes pointing out to the horizon and the west coast of Italy. This morning we took a boat trip around the periphery, an overcast sky blighting my attempts at visual records on the Fuji Finepix although inevitably a frazzling sun broke through the clouds the instant we returned to the harbour - and now we're packing up and leaving this little walled miracle, finding our rented car and, all being well, crossing the border into Montenegro.

Despite its unquestionable beauty, two days here has been more than enough - the ratio of obese tourists to locals must be something like 47:1 and the food is not nearly as cheap nor as delicious as the guidebooks would have us believe. I'm looking forward to the next phase - nine days (count 'em) on a fjord, an optimistic number of books to get through - the iPod's fully charged, the sunhat's at the ready - let's just hope the Roger Farr who is renting us his Montenegrin apartment is not the Roger Farr that, according to www.timeshare.org.uk, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1998 for defrauding 467 timeshare owners out of £1.5M. Reassuring...

How lucky we are...

I’m lacklustre, stuck in work mode, trapped by routine and completely unable to be remotely creative. What’s more, I’ve been haunted by this passage that I read on Radio 4’s PM blog and now everything else seems/is trite and irrelevant:

'On a serious note, I don't know if any of you were listening to Mike Thomson's report this morning on the Today programme from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He spoke to a young mother who was recently abducted, along with scores of people from her village, by a group of rebel soldiers. She says her captives, Hutu militia from
Rwanda known as the Interahamwe, then bayoneted fifty of them before forcing her to hang her own baby... We need to be constantly reminded, don't we, of what's going on there.'

Puts things into perspective a bit.

Growl

In the two months or so since I have been in my current job, I’ve probably been given around eight hours’ worth of work to do. One of the very few satisfying tasks I was assigned was to proof-read a document that would eventually be sent to thousands of company workers, informing them of radical changes to the business. I duly checked the pages for flaws, and identified several, including a grammatical error in the first line – a find which resulted in several consecutive moments of shaming self-congratulation and smuggery. I attempted to hide my glee as I returned the document back to its writer, anticipating praise and thanks.

Imagine my surprise and irritation, therefore, when this very afternoon, the finished document dropped into my inbox (and the inboxes of countless reams of other employees) complete with its original uncorrected errors and the same glaring syntax issue beaming out from the opening phrase.

It’s demoralising enough to have so little to do – but when what you do do is disregarded or lost, it’s really somewhat irksome. Still, the Bank Holiday beckons and I’m off to Suffolk on a hen weekend. All being well I’ll return in one piece next Tuesday.

Gym Dangers

On Monday, in what must have been a fairly comical moment in itself, I was on the cross-trainer in the gym. As usual, I had moved beyond the joys of perspiration and was firmly into the phase to which I refer fondly as ‘Drenched’. As Madonna’s Like A Prayer moved into its second verse, I became aware that my energy levels were flagging somewhat and, preferring to blame my sluggishness on the Queen of Pop rather than my own risible fitness levels, decided to fast forward the track. I reached down to the iPod which was nestled in the cross-trainer’s integral cup holder, but – horrors – instead of seamlessly spinning on to the next upbeat number, I managed to become manually tangled in my headphones wire, wrenching my white rectangular friend out of its holster and sending it clattering to the floor between the footrests, as I accelerated towards the angina-inducing peaks of Workout Level 24.

Breathless and pouring sweat in an Amazonian fashion, I cantered onto solid ground as quickly as I could and scooped up my iPod from its final resting place beneath the cross-trainer. Nervous about potential injuries following the not-insubstantial fall, I gingerly replugged in my headphones and was relieved to hear Madge warbling away as before. Resuming my position on the exercise machine, I recommenced my workout – but just a few moments later and without warning, Like A Prayer stopped, mid-middle eight, and no amount of frantic button pressing in any number of desperate combinations would coax it back into action.

Back at home, the hated grumpy file symbol had appeared on my screen and, following the instructions on the Apple website, I attempted to ‘restore’ my iPod. Sadly this option was forbidden to me: my computer informed me that it was experiencing Error 1418 and was unable to proceed. Feeling outwitted and guilty, I began the grieving process for my little aural wonder. And things looked no better when, on Tuesday night, Simon found a website called www.1418hell.com. This explained that my error message was a cumbersome problem suffered by thousands of iPod owners that mean old Apple was refusing to fix. Clearly, the time had come to start saving for a new pod.

But then, at 5am yesterday morning, my previously mute iPod began emitting a series of random beeps. When my consciousness finally came to me around an hour later, I took a look at the screen, realised the unit was low on battery and plugged it in to the mains. And immediately, miraculously, normality was restored. The music of the spheres tinkled merrily above me and as I commuted into work today, Bob Dylan warbling away in my ears, I felt unmistakeably lucky to have survived this example of my own carelessness without the need to fork out for a new machine and grateful to have been handed a(nother) splendid excuse to steer clear of the cross-trainer for the time being.