Banging on, and on, and on...

Yes. That's all of you, dear readers. Confronted with a total absence of posting on my blog, and even commenting on yours, instead of sending warm emails of encouragement and support in this time of absolute work madness, all you can do is BANG ON about how I am not entertaining you enough. Well, you are all being very naughty and as such will be punished with this long rant about my current life.

So as you know there has been a little glitch in the system, which made me go insane and return to the Motherland for a set period of time. Needless to say, I regretted the decision within minutes of stepping off the wretched train that took me there, laden with broken lugagge and a small Northern English woman, aka Lady V.

The first weeks were hard. Sharing a bed with said Lady V meant occasional punches in the face and kicks in the thighs (apparently I was being mistaken for pesky ex, clearly on account of our... er... similar size? humour? hair colour? No. None of those. I reckon it was just because I am a man). But thankfully after a few weeks the blood-related flatmate packed her stuff and left us one room each: a bedroom and a kitchen. I settled in the kitchen, pulling a small military bed to the corner of the bare room. I remembered how Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria was said to have slept his whole life in a military cot, set in the corner of a barely-furnished room of Schloss Schönbrunn. Images of Raskolnikov also came into my mind (I have read the entire oevre of F. Dostoevski, as you know). My spirits soared at the idea of the noble sacrifice.

Lady V settled in the corner of the other room, the bedroom. She curls up every night before me, around 11, only a dark lock emerging from the duvet. She emits a low, humming noise in her sleep, like a ferret, or the distant engine of a submarine. When she wakes up in the morning, she always claims to have been haunted by Little Pea in her dreams. I think it's the lack of oxygen, but it's no point telling her, she doesn't believe in science.

I have no life in Milan. I work like one of those Wall Street types, devoted to the cause of making money and severed from human emotions and society. Except I don't make money. Any. At all. I sit there at night some times, staring at the ceiling, the glow from the computer screen where I have been typing emails until 1 am still in the back of my retinas, and wonder: what the hell? But I am too tired to think of an answer and I fall asleep in a little pool of drool. Charming. Lady V purrs next door. She gets job offers every other day. Editing jobs for travel guides. Editing jobs for novelists. Practically the entire Milan is asking her to edit something, while her English work posse is asking her to churn out funny articles about herself (we all know how hard that is) at £500 a piece. All this without actually moving from her desk. I don't know how she does it...

We break the work routine every weekend or so, heading down to our Tuscan retreat, where immediately we start behaving like humans again. We laugh, we discuss trivial things, we watch movies, we cook nice meals, we catch up with friends, we enjoy life. Naturally, the absence (hopefully soon to be sorted out) of Internet connection means the only catching up that can be done is with people who actually come to the house.

Then we go back to Milan, and it all starts again. 14 hour work days. Endless meetings, presentations, emails, papers, phone calls, underground journeys to remote parts of town, location visits, shaking of heads, forced ethusiasm, smiling, the occasional bout of anger, sandwiches grabbed on the go.

So, there you are my dear and moaning readers. Without a social life as such, without the occasional film view, chat, drink or even encounter, with only work dominating my current life, what else am I supposed to write about? And when? At 1 am when I eyelids are heavy and I start thinking about old hags to murder, in Dostoevskian style? Uh?

You are lucky people, you. As Little Pea once pointed out to me, there are people who work, like him, and there are timewasters, like the rest of the world.

I think I am turning into Little Pea.

God save us both...