What would you like first, the good news or the bad news?

Obviously, that’s a rhetorical questions since a) it’s my blog and b) I’m writing this rather than asking you in person.

OK so I’ve decided that you shall get the good news first.

The weather is getting a tad warmer. As my regular readers will know, this makes me much happier.

Also, F comes back tomorrow night. But not late, I think. I think he lands at about 6 or 6.30. I will, as usual, pick him up from the airport. Again, I am so much looking forward to him being back – almost excited – like a child!

The third bit of good news is that I have decided to take the first three days of next week as holiday. Actually this is, in some way, being forced upon me. Some stupid rule in this company has been made up that means that any ‘left over’ holiday from last year has to be taken by 31st March. It’s stupid because I would prefer to take it sometime in May or June when the weather is really nice.

You may ask why I am only taking 3 days when I have over 6 days left? Well, Thursday and Friday are ‘forced’ holidays. Thursday because they have decided to celebrate Unification Day. Apparently it’s 150 years on Tuesday since Italy was first unified as Italy and for this year only they have declared the day a ‘bank’ holiday. Then Friday is a holiday because of this thing called a ‘bridge day’ – bridge days occuring when the holiday is on a Tuesday or Thursday, where the bridge is so that the company doesn’t open for just 1 day.

Actually, I had a student last night who is from Veneto (i.e. somewhere near Venice). He said that Venice won’t be celebrating because they didn’t join the union until a couple of years afterwards so, for them, it’s not yet 150 years. In fact, doing a bit of reading up it seems that 1870 would be a better reflection since it was only during that year that Rome became part of the union!

Anyway, they’ve decided on March 17th as that was the day that the first ‘parliament’ was held in the capital – which was, then, Turin.

OK – enough history. The effect of all this history being that I will be on holiday all next week.

This is an end to the good things.

The bad things are that, although it’s getting warmer, it is also going to start with the rain thing. That’s from tomorrow. Worse still, it’s going to continue raining all through the weekend and at least until next Thursday.

The other bad thing is that I am on holiday all next week ……………………….. when it is going to be raining. Exactly why I don’t want to be taking holidays now, ffs!