NOVELIST

May I start with an aside?

It took all of our legendary fitness and stamina (sic) to  stay on our feet during this, arguably the hottest day of our stay. It was also the last day of our waterbus transport tickets. These were offered to us by a kind couple at Venice airport who had apparently purchased more days than their own stay required, and for some reason selected Joanne as the beneficiary of this kind bequeathment. My suspicion remains that, as we queued at the quayside beneath the airport concourse, they took pity on her, given her obvious burden of a tired-looking, hat-topped sweat blob in her charge. ( I could have easily passed an audition to be an extra in that dockside scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, having had to be out of our Edinburgh hotel at 04:00 that first day, and generally being of the kind that loses all mental faculty when simultaneously hot, tired and unsure of the minutae of local transport provision).

Anyway, we decided to spend the whole afternoon after Murano back in the Venetian mainland, hopeful that we could get one more use out of the gifted tickets to get us back to our hotel without the need of splints, medical assistance or full-blown maritime piracy.

I was really looking forward to exploring this part of the island, stretching west from Dorsoduro towards the railway station and road bridge back to the Italian mainland. It seems much less visited by tourists, a fact that contributes to a feeling of wandering into a small, urban oasis.

Malin heads to this part of the island to meet up with Grisani, the head of the Joiner's Guild, passing through the large and somewhat deserted rectangle of Campo De La Lana. This area, a considerable distance from the politics and wealth of San Marco, would have featured far fewer grand houses in the fourteenth century, and almost all of them would have been made of timber.

And having narrowly got away with one aside, perhaps you would allow me one more?

Those of you following this Tour in sequence will not be surprised to see that, after my high levels of anxiety at the sparseness of civic bin provision, I decided (as can be seen vividly in the photo below), to purloin one and hide it about my person for future use.  Sitting here now, in the comfort of my home in the Scottish Highlands, I can share with you that it's this picture, more than any other featured in this Tour, that has led to Joanne enrolling me in an exercise regime sadly lacking over the last year or so since sustaining a concussion on my road cycle.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, it's at this bend in the local canal, where Parraocchia Dei Tolentini meets Fondamenta Dei Tolentini, in the dark evening fog of an early February day, that Malin encounters his biggest threat since disembarking the Seynte Marie, some eleven days earlier.