Florence, like...

We’ve arrived in Florence and it is, like, Very Expensive. We, like, stopped yesterday afternoon during our, like, walk around to get our bearings and it was, like, €8 for a can of Sprite and a Diet Coke which was, like, really expensive but it did mean we got to sit down next to some, like, American teenage girls who were so, like, chatty and we were going to, like, count the times they said like but Guy said that we would, like, need one of those counter thingies that they, like, use for counting traffic in the rush hour on the, like, M25… Guy says I’m, like, beginning to sound like them but I think he’s, like, kidding.

Our room is fine, if you like a view of a hosepipe and a Renault Megane. There are dire warnings about mosquitoes but we are already bitten to smithereens so it doesn’t really matter. We plug in the electric mozzi zapper and have to hope it does it’s stuff. We will try and get repellant tomorrow. That’s ‘buy mosquito repellant’ as opposed to ‘get repellant’ ourselves… We don’t know how to ask in Italian so we have been practising miming it. We will pick a pharmacy where we’re never likely to need to go again… The shower in the bathroom is fierce but obviously used by someone of the height of Toulouse Lautrec… and there is no free internet access. We have to pay €10 to use it. PER HOUR. Good grief. This means no more listening to The Archers each evening – it would cost €2.50… We settle for Italian telly instead and watch the X Factor. In Italian. It’s worse than the UK version – none of them can sing and they talk incessantly…

We switch to a fantastic ‘cops’ type programme originally made in Germany (we know this because the bus used in the chase says ‘Dusseldorf’ on the front) and now dubbed into Italian. In the time we watch it we lose count of the cars that are blown up, crashed, sliced, rolled and smashed – then the baddies end up on the Dusseldorf bus with hostages being chased (very gently – we reckon it was about 40mph) by the good cops in cars. Everyone is a rotten shot so nobody gets hurt and then the bus runs out of fuel and the baddies call up another baddy who was in the original bit where they parachuted off buildings to come and get them and then it’s the news and then adverts and then another programme entirely. We will never know what happened to the baddies on the bus…

It was, like, really frustrating…