It’s 7.10 on Tuesday morning. My apologies for this delayed missive. I got back to Cambridge late last night after four days spent in Rome. My calves and knees may be screaming in pain from the walking and climbing, but my head is still swimming in the sounds, smells and sights of the Eternal City.

It will take time for experiences to seep into the imagination and reappear in some altered form on the typed page, but I do have a couple of immediate takeaways.

The first, a small insight into where stories come from.

The Coliseum is, well, colossal. Stood on a balustrade on the second tier, directly in front of my view of where the Emperor once sat, was a very large seagull. At first I and others tried to ignore it, but it was so arrogant and imposing that eventually we succumbed t...

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