I am in that expat no-man’s land of oddly categorised flours, strange leavening agents, unfamiliar baking pans and an oversized toaster oven to bake in, so I try to forgive myself the many baking failures I’ve experienced this year, even as I challenge myself to empty those cupboards before next weekend’s departure date for London. A good conjunction of contents and necessities as the restaurants and shops that aren’t closed now are likely to be next week. The price we pay for not living in a tourist town.

And even more prices to pay for sending mail through dear confusing Poste Italiane. Today I learned that:

• it is cheaper to send packages to Canada than to England by surface mail
• it is cheaper to send packages by expedited delivery to England than by surface mail
• there is no book rate
• there is a book rate, only it’s not called a book rate, it’s called M-Bag. There is a picture of an M-Bag on the information page about this service, but the bag isn’t something you need to buy in order to use the service. Or that’s today’s information anyway.
• it says on their website that Poste Italiane offers a customs clearance service for non EU inbound parcels at 5,16 euro per item (blogger’s note: this ‘service’ delivers the package to the customs office, and is in addition to any duty that may or may not be charged by Italian customs, which presumably is an extra service to the grateful customer)(maybe the generous interpretation is that the word ‘service’ simply doesn’t translate easily into Italian?)

Stay tuned, it’s likely to get sillier still before I’m done.

I don’t recall exactly what led me back to Anne Carson’s amazing poem sequence, The Glass Essay, but I was thrilled to discover the whole thing on the (bless the living memory of Ruth Lilly) Poetry Foundation website. A gift and a half for a poet who lives halfway round the world from her own personal poetry library. If you can’t face reading the whole thing at one sitting (and I find it hard to stop once I start), check out HERO. Stunning.