Well, I did manage to get out of bed at 3am on Thursday after all. I didn’t think I would, but I popped two herbal sleeping tablets on Wednesday night so slept well. I left before four, but even that, and a fair amount of speeding, didn’t give me enough time to get to check-in on time. Fortunately we were flying business class, though, so the desk closed about twenty minutes before the flight so I made it with plenty of leeway.

It wasn’t a bad flight. Quite bumpy as we crossed the Alps, but the view was fantastic. Tall snow-covered mountains poking up through the clouds. The clouds themselves looked like deep soft snow fields between them.

We were staying in the Le Meridien, beside the impressive Central Station. It wasn’t a nice area, as far as Milan goes, being overshadowed by the ugly Pirelli Tower. The station, though, was truly impressive. Someone said that it had been built for the glory of Mussolini, and looking at the architecture you could believe it. Our guide, though, said the first stone was laid in the early 1920s, so it can’t have been true.

The meetings were kept mercifully short, and were followed by an extensive buffet (as was almost everything we did for the whole two days), and there was plenty of free time for mooching around and doing our own stuff.

We had a tour of the city, which highlighted some pretty squares, but in all I wasn’t particularly impressed by Milan. It was pretty once, I think. You can see the underlying structures that would once have been very nice. It’s fallen into disrepair now, though. It’s dirty, and there is a lot of graffiti, and once you move away from the around around the Duomo there’s really nothing worth talking about.

The tube trains are nice and wide, though, and they seem to run pretty regularly, so even during the rush hour they are busy but not so cramped that you have to let them go and wait for the next one. They do have some rather extreme warning signs, though.

Driving home late last night, I pulled off the M25 and onto the A12 where two deer were grazing on the central reservation. They looked very fragile as they munched away with the lorries and cars thundering past. They didn’t seem bothered, though. As I went past one of them looked up and watched, its tail being blown by a heavy jugernaut.

I downloaded my pictures and flopped into bed, then slept until the alarm went off.

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