Day 2: Begins well, ends in bruises. Get up and have breakfast. So far so good. Meet up with Alberto and the gang and the family Scarfe in the hotel lobby to head off to his press conference. We’re led into the holding tank before Gerald takes to the stage in what was the old courthouse cells, although thankfully now renovated and looking very plush and, more importantly, very cool as its a furnace outside and its only 9.30am. Gerald gives a remarkable talk about his career and fields many questions from the audience over the next two hours. Afterwards I meet up with some very old friends who are in the audience and we have a natter whilst Gerald signs things until his hand drops off. This takes us neatly into lunch at the art centre and we all sit down for a couple of beers and food. However, presenting the menu seems to be a difficult task for the waiter to accomplish and after six attempts and an hour later the menu finally appears. We order. I had a rather excellent tagliatelle, so I conclude that the wait was indeed worth it. As the party dissipates, Gerald and his son Rupert go for a stroll around the exhibition and I sit and chat to his wife, Jane Asher. After a while she decides to join her husband, and this is where things start to go very wrong because she completely fails to see the plate glass door that I thought she was going to open and crashes nose first straight into it. Ouch! She didn’t see it. Blood everywhere! I then become her first aid carer and take her to the bathroom with a box of tissues and with the help of one of our friends, Stefano, get a pack of ice from the bar straight onto her hooter. They go back to the hotel and I head off to meet friends Simon and Phil at a nearby bar. Many beers later and Phil, his wife Laila and Dave (who I kept calling Steve and has an Australian accent but insists he’s Irish) are heading to my hotel to pick up the shuttle bus to the concert via a bar to grab some bottles of wine for the show. The bus takes us to within a mile of the show and a vast influx of Pink Floyd refugees make their way to the stadium. We drink wine. I have heard rumours that the show was very good. In the excitement I lost my hotel room key, which would have made for a very entertaining episode in a sit-com as I tried to explain to the night porter that I was a fine upstanding English gentleman, a guest at the hotel and no, I wasn’t some staggering drunken British idiot with a bloodied knee who was trying to blag a room for the night. And so your correspondent heads for Rome...
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 08:37:50 +0000
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