Unlike my trip to the UK in November 2012, last week's visit passed off without any major disasters. True, I managed to leave my hat behind in the Lamb and Flag, Welney, the Tuesday before last when I went there with Richard Dalton, and the previous Sunday I'd left the parmesan I'd brought over for Sam Jefferies in Dave's fridge in Leicester. But Candy drove me to Welney on our way back from Quinn's swimming lesson in Downham to retrieve the hat, and Dave very kindly posted the cheese to Sam in Bristol. It arrived there before I did. And, above all, when I flew back to Italy this Monday - despite only having forty minutes to do so - I managed to get from the plane to the coach for Pedaso, so avoiding having to spend the night in Fiumicino.
The beginning of the trip, though, was a little more stressful thanks to UCAS. To explain. When I was at work I had quite a lot of involvement with UCAS, helping our FE students to compile their HE applications and, as Course Director, dealing with applications to our BA Humanities programme. Apart from the slight absurdity of receiving UCAS forms from my own FE students I had no problems with UCAS. It was certainly an improvement on the system obtaining when I was applying to university in the early sixties: you had to fill in a separate form for every university you hoped might offer you a place. In a word, UCAS simplified things.
In July I read an amusing article by Beppe Severgnini in the Corriere della Sera in which he referred to UCAS. Only here the initials stood for the legendary Ufficio Complicazioni Affari Semplici [The office for complicating straightforward transactions] which Severgnini dubbed one of Italy's longest lived institutions. It was one which I had had plenty of dealings with in Italy; to my surprise, I was to discover it had extended its tentacles across the Channel.
When Dave came over to Rome in the summer for the Cohen concert I booked us train tickets from Rome to Ancona online from Trenitalia, Italy's publicly owned railway company. It was a simple matter: you made the booking and the tickets were emailed to you. Before I came to England in November I booked a National Express coach ticket from Wisbech to Bristol online from the company's website. Like the Trenitalia tickets they were emailed to me. Unfortunately the British railway companies have outsourced their online booking to Italy's UCAS. Rather than simply emailing you the tickets they send you a code which has to be punched into a machine on the station platform, having first inserted the debit card with which you bought the tickets. Envisaging problems I didn't book the first train to leave Stansted after my plane was due to land. The tickets are non-transferable and had the plane landed late I could well have missed the train. So with over an hour in hand to collect the tickets I thought I had UCAS licked. It was only when the ticket inspector asked to see my ticket that I discovered I'd nearly lost. The machine on the platform had spewed out three cards, and as only one of them was the ticket I'd paid scant attention to the other two. When I handed the inspector my ticket he asked me for my receipt - "The ticket's not valid without it," he added. So that was what one of the other cards was. God knows what I'd done with it, I didn't think it had any importance. Fortunately he added that it would be valid if I could show him the email confirming the purchase which I was able to.
Thereafter, the trip went smoothly. Dave's daughter, Kate, picked me up from Leicester station, and his cousin John took me to Dave's seventieth party. It was also a mini Keele reunion, with Arthur McCutcheon and Mike Farmer as well as Dave and myself (see the photo heading this post). The following day Dave, Arthur and I FaceTimed another Keele contemporary, Joe Pownall, whom Sue - in a piece of investigative work worthy of Miss Marple - had managed to track down. Dave and I hadn't been in touch with him since the late seventies.
After six days staying at Candy's I went to the Old Elizabethans' dinner in Bristol
on the 9th, staying with Sam and Pam Jefferies. Chris Vincent was also staying with Sam:
The following day the four of us went to the Wye Valley in the afternoon
and in the evening Mike Farmer popped in on his way home from a party in Chippenham.
And on Monday I returned home to a Le Marche swept by tempests which had killed two people in the north of the Region.
