There’s no place like…

Home again today.  The flight was at 6:30am so we had to get up at 3am.  Actually we could probably have left it quite a bit later but R is very fond of following regulations and when I am travelling with him I generally let him have his way (he will disagree with this but as it is me that it writing this you will have to take my word for it).  We had a final Sfogliatella in the airport.

These are a sort of puff pastry cake with a filling of ricotta and lemon – I was much taken with them as they are rich and crunchy without being too sweet.  So when I got home today I had a look at how to make them.  Immediately I hit statements like “Italy’s ultimate pastry challenge” “The dessert with 100 layers” etc. and realized that it might not be so easy.  The actual recipe and process looks very difficult to duplicate at home, and all the “cheat” versions I have found so far, seem to be no more than puff pastry with custard in the middle.   I will need to see what I can come up with myself – the essential thing seems to be lard in the pastry and a solid filling which is not too sweet.

So we had an uneventful journey home.  The only bad bit was that yet again I set the metal detector off at the airport, and yet again they made me take my shoes off.  It sounds stupid, but after my triple arthrodesis 18 months ago, my foot is basically functionally fine (I can walk miles and go up and down hundreds of stairs) but one residual problem I have is that walking on hard floors in bare feet is extremely painful.  I did think about trying to explain the situation in Italian but it was just too difficult and complicated, so I screwed up my courage and just went ahead and removed them.  It hurt walking through the detector, and of course I still set it off because the problem is not my shoes it is the metal in my foot.  Oh well..

On the way back in the car we discussed whether holidays are actually worth it – or to put it differently, would we not have had just as good a time at home with an extra £3000 to spend.  Actually the answer was perhaps not.  Yes, going to different places is a bit stressful, and yes, perhaps individual experiences are not inherently more “fun” than playing on the computer.  But thirty years on R and J and I are still talking about the experiences we have had and enjoying remembering them – good and bad.  As R put it “That way you can remember one week as different from all the others”.

So that is what holidays are for – memories.  And this is also why I write this blog – between this and my former one I have 12 years of memories to call on.