‘I think you should take a picture of me,” I say to my husband, with slightly gruff embarrassment. We are on a long-planned, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Venice, undertaking a self-devised initiation rite for the empty nest stage of our lives: working and living in a single room for a month with our mildly demented dog.
I can’t stop taking pictures – 263 so far, and counting. Everything is beautiful: the luminous green water against faded yellow and terracotta, the bridges topped with smart Venetians looking at their phones, the glitter of sun or low-lying morning mist on water. I have to capture the joyful decorative flourishes: a stone camel here, a brass lion there, the five-tiered Murano glass chandelier surrounded by plaster daisies in the library where I’m working. My phone is packed with boats, a woman walking nine chihuahuas and countless gulls.
