I tre amici

In the summer of 1985 I went back to Piovene for what turned out to be the last time. I'm not really sure why it turned out that way and have always been sorry that it did but arguably not sorry enough to do anything about it. Idleness? Quite probably.

Anyway. In the summer of 1985 I returned to Piovene with two comrades-in-arms - Mark Townsend and Malcolm Drummond Ashleigh Cooke (I'm sure the Ashleigh was spelt that way but ...). Of the three of us, Mal was the only one who could drive and therefore the only one with a car. He had a lovely bright red XR3i and that was to be our chariot for the journey from Gatow in West Berlin to Piovene Rochette in Italy - 987 km. Actually, that's 987 km now that Germany has been reunited. At the time we had to go down the central corridor from West Berlin to Helmstedt and only then cut south to Italy and that took the journey up to 1,147 km.

It was a cracking holiday. We stayed in a bed & breakfast in Piovene and Paola and Fulvio took us around to all sorts of places ... and to Venice of course.

One day Mal decided that we were going to go to Lido di Iesolo. I wasn't that keen simply 'cos I don't like tourist traps but I went along under protest. We booked rooms in a hotel for two people because we didn't have enough cash on us for three and then went out. Mal and Mark ended up chatting up a couple of German housewives on a girls' holiday while I sat, uninterested, disinterested and bored, watching the pidgin interaction between them. Eventually, they decided that it was time to go back to the hotel. By this time it was lashing down with rain and ... guess what. Nobody could remember where the hotel was. We traipsed the streets of Lido for hours in the pouring rain and finally found it.

I slept on the floor of the room and tried to sneak out early in the morning. I was caught sneaking out but managed to persuade the receptionist that I'd only come in to the hotel to wake the lads up. I'm certain that the fella didn't believe me but after a while he stopped arguing with me.

Tired, wet and hungry, we headed back to Piovene. We came back to a very narked Paola. Narked that we'd disappeared without saying anything. I'd anticipated this and it was one of the reasons I hadn't wanted to simply disappear. Anyway, over dinner that evening all was forgiven as I recounted the daring adventures Mal, Mark and Marco in Lido to uncontrollable fits of laughter of a room full of Italians. The two lads were sat in the middle of it all, not understanding a word that was said and knowing that it was their adventures that had everyone in fits.

I enjoyed that couple of weeks but it had been frustrating. All I had wanted to do was chill with Paola and Fulvio. The lads wanted to get out on the pull and drink. We ended up heading back to Berlin early because they'd got bored. I could have stayed there for months. Nobody's fault of course. Des gouts et des couleurs. That's all.

I never heard from Paola and Fulvio again. I wrote a few times but they never wrote back. Another door shut behind me. Maybe they'd outgrown me. In the seven years since we'd first met, she'd matured; grown up. I very much suspect that I hadn't. Life in the armed forces was never particularly conducive to the maturation of young men. Maybe I still haven't.