Last

I woke early and left the hotel a little after 9am, giving myself plenty of time to lug my bags the few hundred metres up to the train station, buy a ticket, and then catch the 10.10am train to Milan. I arrived at the station around 9.30am, and found a biglietto machine… and the 10.10am was fully booked.

Dammit!

Instead I had to buy a ticket on the 12.38pm, in more than three hours’ time. With heavy, bulky bags to carry I couldn’t just go for a walk or do some shopping, so I worked through the next three hours doing some writing and photo-editing in a cafe, dragging the bags down to Emporium to see if I could still access their wifi (nope – they were closed and their steel security shutters blocked the wifi signal), playing sudokus on my phone and standing on the platform checking my watch every 30 seconds.

The train eventually arrived and nearly four hours later I was in Milan. After checking into my hotel, I decided to do one last whip around of my favourite bits of the city. So I had an aperol spritz at the bistro where I’d had my first aperitivo (I wasn’t hungry enough for the full board of carbs), then an old-fashioned at a bar in the Isola district with a name that called to me.

Then over to the Corso Buenos Aires where I finally found some shoes to replace my Florentine leather skate shoes. Then one last late aperitivo at the Monkey Bar near my hotel – something with mezcal, lime, elderflower and fresh basil.

The sweetest little moment of the day was when I was sitting in the Isola, enjoying the gathering twilight, when some guy whizzed past on one of those monowheel motorised skateboard things, blasting ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’ by Hall and Oates. I’m going to miss this place.