Browsing books about lemons

Is planning a trip more fun that actually going on one?

I can tell when my brother is on holiday because my WhatsApp starts pinging at me to pin down dates for a trip roughly 18 months away. He is certainly not the only one who spends their down time on one holiday planning another. It is my go-to distraction activity in the car passenger seat and I sometimes don’t even really know what I prefer - the planning or the going on.

For our next trip, Italy’s Cinque Terre in February - really hoping for exceptional weather and no crowds - I have fully jumped into the reading list curation as well as all the other usual stuff. Maybe reading fiction is better prep now than a guide book anyway; you can look up Trip Advisor reviews from Google Maps while you are there, complete with opening hours and how busy it is ‘right now’. You can auto translate a question, take a picture of a menu etc. The ‘Where to Eat’ and ‘Useful Phrases’ in Lonely Planet- pronounced mee-skoo-zee - seem a bit Baedeker.

Saying that, I still bought a Lonely Planet ‘Pocket Genoa and Cinque Terre’. It’s fun to flick through and the compound adjectives sound pretty good:

• Food-centric wine bars

• A fabulously in-the-moment, pleasure-seeking [destination]

I also like that Genoa is described as ‘contradictory’.

All very promising.

But what was more exciting was getting my hands on a copy of The Land Where Lemons Grow, by Helena Attlee. It’s a cultural history of Italy told through the story of its lemons and I cannot wait to read it.