I have seen the future and I don’t like it. All week the city’s been invaded by Italian high school students, yelling, pushing, gum-chewing, cell phone-addicted mouth-breathers, come here to block the streets, buy stupid hats and, what was it, oh yes, to better understand the nature of the Renaissance in Northern Italy.

What a waste of time these school trips are. Sixteen year olds should be shackled hand and foot to a classroom desk because time is short and their heads are presently full of junk. I know. I was sixteen once. And things are much, much worse now.

I don’t mind the kindergarten groups that come. They walk al coccodrillo and hold hands nicely and their faces show sheer wonderment the moment they actually see the basilica of San Marco and realize it looks exactly like the picture in their teacher’s book. But if I had my way beyond kindergarten there’d be no more educational jollies, until say, age 40 plus. After that I think we should be allowed an optional gap year every decade, to roam the world, visit museums and gaze at art.

So I’ve spent the week grouching about these teenagers and then last night I got talking to an American who was here as a student and has come back for the first time in 30 years. She said, ‘I don’t remember any of the facts I was taught back then, but I know coming here opened a window onto a world I hadn’t known existed. It changed me.’

Well then. If a worthwhile seed gets sown for even one student in a hundred… Better to light a penny candle.

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Signs of life in the holiday rental across the street from our bedroom window. The first of the year. The street is so narrow we could almost touch fingertips but I’ve never set foot there, such is the topography of this city of blind alleys and gated courtyards. And the holidaymakers, because they’re absorbed in the adventure of playing house in a foreign place or more likely because they’re just not as nosey as I am, haven’t noticed me. I can tell you what they had for breakfast: decaffeinated coffee, vacuum-packed croissants and tasteless strawberries (too early in the season). I can tell you what time they got up (7.30) and that the tea towel they can’t find has fluttered from the windowsill to the street four floors below. In seven years I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any of these holidaymakers out and about in the street. Or is it that I don’t recognize them, that they look so different when they’re not wearing a bathrobe and scratching themselves where the sun don’t shine?

I notice more and more stories in the Italian press about parish priests being penalised for intruding rudely on their parishioners’ Sunday morning lie-in by ringing their church bells. I know this kind of campaigning goes on in Britain, where the church now has about the same status as tree-hugging, a country where you can’t go into any store, not even a book shop, without being forced to listen to piped music, but a call to worship is regarded as ‘noise nuisance’. But in Italy! We live by the bells here. They wakes us, they signal it’s time to contemplate lunch, and the six o’clock angelus marks the end of my working day.

Well one priest in the Veneto has dug his heels in. As he points out, the church was there long before the complainers. If you don’t like church bells, move to Saudi. I think I might send the Dom a little something towards his fine.

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St Patrick’s, so I shut up shop early. One thing about being self-employed, you can pick and choose which holidays you mark. As far as I’m concerned you can keep St Valentine’s. But St Patrick, Bishop of Armagh is definitely worth the raising of a glass. My husband’s only notionally Irish, one of the Bronx Fitzpatricks, but we usually mark the day by gathering an Irish contingent around our table. Last year we even made them shamrock boutonnieres but we won’t be doing that again. Five minutes out of water and shamrock looks like last week’s salad. I wonder how the Queen Mother used to keep hers looking so fresh and perky while she inspected the Irish Guards? She must have had a tiny Shamrock Freshener in Waiting hidden under her lapel.

This year our guests included Miss Anna O’Halloran, who squeeze-tested all the olives, (green, of course) before she handed them round, and the McDonnells of Kildare who gave us a toast to the Enlightener of Ireland, then stood out on our rooftop deck and scanned the night sky till they could show us Orion. Or O’Rion as I suppose we should call it, on St Patrick’s at least.

The Auld Feller didn’t give us his Michael Flatley impersonation this year. Ankles playing up. Well it’s been a long hard week.

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