20. Winter evening on Wimbledon Common

(It was cold. We’re meant to get snow over the next few days.)

Here’s a rather lovely story I heard yesterday. There’s a new Masters piano student at the Academy, from Vietnam. She grew up playing the piano from old Russian editions, which was all that was available there. All the writing on them – titles, composers, indications – wa in Russian, in Cyrillic script, which nobody knew how to read. So it was not until she came to study at the Royal Academy that she realised that she had been playing works by composers called Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin…

She said that most of all, her time at the Academy had taught her two things: 1: that composers were real people; and 2: that she was also a real person who could have a real relationship with the person who was called Beethoven, the person who was called Mozart and the person who was called Chopin.

Is that not extraordinary?

19. Home again

A quick note tonight, because I’m still very jetlagged – we managed one good night’s sleep on our return, and since then have struggled. But I’m so tired tonight that I’m sure I’ll sleep…

Anyway, it was a long trip back from Mexico; the most interesting part of it was listening to airport officials in Mexico City make animal noises at each other through their walkie-talkies. They were going through the entire zoo (alternated with excerpts of songs) and falling around laughing in between times. The airport is fairly quiet late on a Saturday night, evidently.

And although I did pick up quite a few Spanish words over the fortnight, it was such a relief, on the Air France flights and then at Charles de Gaulle airport, to be back in a language where I could talk in sentences!

 

It was hot in Acapulco on the last day (not quite as hot as Adelaide, thankfully, but quite warm enough) so we had a short stroll along the shadiest bits of the sea front, then thankfully inserted ourselves into a nice looking little cafe for some guacamole and cold pineapple juice. Unfortunately once we’d enjoyed those we realised that we had only $US7 or $US100 (most places take $US but give change in pesos) and our bill was $US9 (actually a literal conversion would have been closer to $7 but they always bump up the rates a bit when they convert, which I guess is reasonable since they have to change it back). Anyway, Roy had to go wandering off to find somewhere to change his $100 note while I waited in the cafe. This took quite some time and I was getting pretty worried, since we had to get back to the ship to be taken to the airport… in the end he came back with $100 worth of pesos, being unable to break his note into smaller US money. Anyway, it was good guacamole. We also enjoyed the little fish market on the foreshore – lots of little fishing boats pulled up on the sand under palm trees and women and children preparing shellfish, cleaning the shells (ready to sell the pretty ones to the tourist markets) and selling the fish. I saw one woman get into her Beetle holding about four (whole) small fish she’d just bought – in her hand; no wrapping of any sort. I wonder what her car smelt like (in that heat, too).  It did look like nice fish though, and was certainly fresh…

 

Back in London it is cold and damp – at least today is; the last two days were beautifully clear (but still cold). I prefer this to 45 though.

We’ve been slowly trying to wake up, doing bits of shopping, pottering around; we went for a nice walk in Morden Hall Park (our local park, the former grounds of the old manor house) and rode our bikes to our newly discovered Italian deli/bakery/coffee place to stock up on nice things (the coffee wasn’t too bad, either).

Morden Hall

18. Acapulco

A final word from Acapulco, before we fly home tomorrow… and an epic trip it will be too: leave the ship at 1, fly to Mexico City at 4, hang around the airport there for 6 hours then fly to Paris and thence to London, arriving at 6:30 on Sunday evening. Sigh. Just when I’ve finally started sleeping really well again. Anyway, Acapulco is chaotic and confusing and probably not best seen on a hot day when they’re digging up the roads and you have still not a great deal of energy. But it was interesting. We didn’t go near the resorty bits but found ourselves quickly in the old, non-touristy part of town – crazy footpaths, roads going in strange directions (the mountains come right down to the sea so it’s steep and there are lots of rapid changes of direction and angle), interesting looking shops and great looking roadside food stalls – all rather exhilarating and just a little scary; I wouldn’t wander around after dark. Around the main roads and the port are the usual crowd of hawkers and touts – I think every port they’ve been more aggressive than the last, or maybe I’ve just not got enough energy to deal with them. In any case, we’ve found that it’s quite effective to bark ‘equipaje’ (crew) – or alternatively ‘ya tengo’ (‘I have already!’) when they come trying to sell sunglasses, watches and everything else. The prize for the best tout of the day went to the taxi driver who came up and said, ‘You want lost and found? I can get you lost!’ So we went to the market in the old town, looking for an extra bag in which to cart back the rest of our gear (we’ve bought too many presents…); we found one and I discovered that I am entirely hopeless at bargaining. If we (ie Roy) offered a lower price and the shopkeepers conferred and looked sad and gave long explanations of why they couldn’t possibly sell it at that price, I’d just want to say ‘Oh… ok then…’ and slink away. Roy was a little better, and I did manage to reduce the price by two dollars by threatening not to buy the bag at all (we were also getting Roy a lovely leather belt)… Still, I don’t think I’m cut out for haggling. Anyway, we weren’t ashore for too long because I just found Acapulco too overwhelming, but it certainly is fascinating too. It has a very colourful history – it’s in an amazing bay, into which Francis Drake, pirate that he was, would try to chase the Spanish treasure ships – and of course in the first half of the twentieth century so many famous people and film stars came to live or stay there. The old part of town is clearly still looking back to those glory days; there’s a lot of faded chic – a magnificent Art Deco hotel on the front, with a very impressive entryway/arcade, now mostly turned into shops and looking very faded; and lots of old shop fronts that must have been wonderful when they were new and swarming with people and luxuries. Now of course all the luxury is to be found in the glittering highrise around the long swimming beaches; we didn’t go there today but will take a stroll along the front tomorrow morning. Yesterday we were in Zihuatanejo, a little further north of Acapulco – an erstwhile fishing village that has become a ‘destination’, not least by the recent eruption of new fashionable resort towns roundabout – they call it the ‘Mexican Riviera’. Still, there were a lot of picturesque parts of the town, another beautiful bay and lovely beaches (Roy had another happy swim and I watched pelicans fishing) and we had great fish fajitas at a little cafe right on the beach, waving off the people trying to sell us rugs, ponchos, hammocks, plastic birds with built-in tweets, necklaces, wooden painted things, terracotta bowls and woven bracelets with our names on. I’ve still not come across any street seller who can top the man with the iguana in Huatulco. He wasn’t selling it (you’ll be relieved to know) but offering photos cuddling it. It was big – he was wandering around cradling it in his arms and its tail reached the ground – and really quite impressive. I watched him wander up behind some unsuspecting Yorkshire lady sitting at her lunch; when she turned around she came immediately face to face with the iguana, which gave her quite a start. Between Huatulco and Zihuatanejo we had a day at sea, which was rather lovely – it was absolutely calm, very blue and very beautiful, warm and clear. We saw heaps of big turtles, just floating along beside the boat, basking in the sunshine – it was quite magical. And after our concert – unusually, a single concert, early, at 5pm – we went up to the top deck with a glass of champagne and watched the sun set – we were sailing almost due west, so it was quite spectacular, and there were two big seabirds – I’m not sure what – swooping and fishing around the bow. Just beautiful. Even more spectacular, as we were leaving Zihuatanejo last night we sailed right past a humpback whale, also basking happily. That was rather amazing. Our dinner companions (on nights we don’t perform we go to one of the regular dinner sittings, where we have to sit at the same table each night; happily our companions – Keith and Sue, from Yorkshire – were delightful) told us about a cruise they took last year with the Royal Caribbean line, run by and mostly filled with Americans. Apparently the whole cruise was geared entirely towards shopping, so when they arrived in places like St Petersburg their port guides would have something like three pages of information about where to buy what and, tucked away in a single paragraph somewhere near the end, a grudging admission that in St Petersburg one can also do things like see the Winter Palace or the Hermitage. At least the P&O port guides always start with a page of local history and general information… So a long trip tomorrow; I’m looking forward to being back in London for a little while, although the cold will be a shock (and the trip will be no fun)… then, after a fortnight, to Paris for another two weeks, then back to London… then off to Barbados to join another ship! How strange.

We've loved watching these pelicans at every port.

17. Beer in Nicaragua

I apologise for my silence over the past few days; rapidly switching between three time zones, climates and seasons finally caught up with me and I’ve been quite unwell. Although I’m gradually climbing out of it again now, I was quite content to lie in bed this morning – ignoring the charms of Huatulco, Mexico – ‘Mexico’s newest resort area, selected by computer as the ideal resort location’ (doesn’t that sound charming) – and watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. Which was truly extraordinary. Lovely things: Simple Gifts played beautifully by Perlman, Yo Yo Ma and the clarinettist and pianist whose names I forget, and how they moved their fingers in the well-below-freezing temperatures I don’t know, but it was meditative and calming and lovely, happening directly before the swearing in and giving a moment of peace between the cheering. And the benediction from the wonderful old pastor who began with poetry, passed through a very gracious and moving prayer for peace and tolerance and ended with rhyme that had everyone laughing. Just how prayer should be (as opposed to the evangelical exhortations that began the thing). And Obama stumbling over the oath – only time he’s ever lost his cool I think. And his daughter taking a photo of him during his speech. And the speech itself, which was truly extraordinary, powerful and passionate and beautifully delivered, and clearly indicating such a new way of thinking about the world and their country. We felt lucky, and very moved, to be watching this, and live too – the first time in my life I’ve actually been on eastern US time, as it happens! Unfortunately for us, the inaugural address was occasionally interrupted by patches of static, local tv signals interfering with the ship’s satellite system. Mostly this was just noise and the occasional word, but the one clear sentence we got, right as Obama was reaching an impassioned height (and we never lost our picture) was ‘Oh, Lassie, come home!’ After all that we did go ashore and discovered that Huatulco, although rather soulless, was not quite as bad as it sounded. It was small, not too developed and not too tasteless, though it was endowed with pushier guys touting taxis, tours and restaurants than anywhere else we’d been. At every port there’s a bunch of these guys hanging around the port entrance, but most of them you can say a quick, firm no to and they leave you alone. This lot – particularly the ones in front of the restaurants – wouldn’t let up; they’d accompany us for a hundred metres along the roadway talking at us (in English; they have better English than in the other places so I guess it takes them longer to run out of words). This is very frustrating. But it does make finding a place to have lunch easy: our method is to go to the one place that doesn’t do that. Today this was not, perhaps the best idea. I had the most hard-core fish soup I ever hope to be served: incredibly strong, fishy broth with a fish in it. Well, most of a fish; a large fleshy head and a large fleshy tail. I’m not normally squeamish about food but I really struggled trying to spoon up soup from a bowl with a dead fishy eye an inch away. So I couldn’t eat that much of it… and we ended up going to another cafe – which not only didn’t tout their wares, when we sat down they ignored us completely for quarter of an hour – and had fresh guacamole – which was superb – and tortilla chips. By the side of that cafe – which was right on the beach – was strung one of those enormous, extravagant Mexican hammocks, and in it was a little girl who was being rocked to sleep (actually, swung, quite energetically) by her father. That was nice. Then Roy went for a swim, which made him happy; I didn’t have quite that much energy but enjoyed watching the beach and looking out for rays (little ones, forearm length, lurking around the bottom). Oh, and we saw dolphins at sea yesterday and some people saw big turtles swimming beside the boat too. A number of the crew had been given the day off today and a bunch of the guys went swimming in the little bay – all these lovely Indian guys, relieved to have a day where they didn’t have to be ceaselessly polite to demanding passengers, and being exuberant boys in the water (they’re not much more). I enjoyed watching them clowning around too. We had another of those Great British Sailaways this evening (cf Gibraltar) – so tasteful to farewell a foreign place with God Save the Queen played at noise-pollution levels. And around the photographer’s gallery of the ship, they are now hawking certificates that – for a certain sum – will be made out in your name to certify that one has indeed transited the Panama Canal. They must sell them, I suppose, or they wouldn’t do them at all. Certainly some passengers have been heard to say that since we’ve ‘done Panama’ now we may as well go home. It was indeed quite an extraordinary thing to see, particularly the last part, through two big locks and a lake. But what fascinated me most were two guys who spent the entire time we were passing through one lock – about 45 minutes – attempting to throw ropes over a crossbeam held between two posts somewhat taller than AFL goalposts. They hadn’t succeeded by the time we got out of the lock so I never did figure out what they were going to do once they got the ropes up there, but watching them certainly kept me entertained.

I can’t tell you anything about Puntarenas, in Costa Rica, because I slept most of that day. I did manage to get off the boat briefly in San Juan del Sur, in Nicaragua, just because it was Nicaragua and I had to see it. A beautiful bay, filled with beautiful children playing on the sand and in the water (the ones who weren’t trying to sell us flowers made from plaited palm fronds, but they were beautiful too), and a lovely lunch – local cockles with a garlicky, oniony sauce, plus Nicaraguan beer… I don’t normally touch the stuff but in this climate it’s appropriate – it’s what everyone drinks – and this was really not bad. I couldn’t move much but enjoyed sitting and watching the beach and just the feeling of being there. And I bought a truly beautiful little leather handbag, in different colour patches stitched together. The ship is rolling around quite a lot tonight (after a couple of beautifully calm days) and there will be some movement tomorrow (a sea day). We’re doing another concert tomorrow (I’ve missed the last two) and are hoping it’s not too bad for that. Roy took this last photo, just as we were coming out of the Canal into the Gulf of Panama (I think that’s right) – islands just off the coast.

On the Canal

16. Coffee in Costa Rica

Greetings from Limon, in Costa Rica. The currency of Costa Rica is the Colon (there are approximately 748 Colons to the pound. Try converting that in a hurry). Yesterday we were in the city of Colon, which is not in Colombia but in Panama. This is quite confusing.  Anyway, Colon is the second city of Panama, built when the Panama railroad was being constructed in the 1850s and now also at the eastern end of the Panama Canal. We didn’t go exploring there, having been warned against independent exploration and being pretty tired in any case. Instead, I spent much of the afternoon practising – since most people were out on their tours the two lounges with pianos were empty, and it was lovely to have all that time to spend playing a nice Steinway. Tomorrow we sail back to Colon and through the Canal, which I am so looking forward to seeing. The landscape in this part of the world is spectacular, rich and jungled (I know that’s not a word but it should be), and the air is heavy and smells of flowers and fruit. In the little park in central Limon the trees are so tall and so lush, so different; and the street bushes and trees are brightly coloured too – everything is. There are so many different and beautiful birds – since we have been on the ship I have been enjoying watching pelicans – two different types, one big, brown and grey, and another slightly smaller, grey with a yellow head. Last night a whole bunch of them were flying around and over the boat at sunset and it was just beautiful.

 

 

Sunday night was the first ‘formal night’ on board; this is a big occasion. We had been swimming until after 6 (which is when you’re meant to look respectable in the lounges and dining areas). Instead of putting on our (normal) clothes to get back to our cabin to change again into our formal wear, we thought we could get away with just making a dash for our cabin; since the lift would take us straight down there we thought we had a reasonable chance of not meeting anybody. Unfortunately we got in the wrong lift, and when the doors opened at deck 2 we were not in our quiet cabin corridor but in the central atrium, milling with people dressed in tuxedos and floor-length dresses – and we were standing there dripping, barefooted and with towels wrapped around our waists. So we dived for the lift buttons, hit a deck number at random – anything to make the doors close – and got out of there before we could be recognised (we hoped…).

 

Overheard: couple talking to one of the waiters. ‘You’re from India… do you speak Indian then?’

 

Better still, yesterday at lunch I was asked (with the rider ‘I don’t mean to offend, but…’) ‘do you ever play nice music?’ (The previous night’s concert had included Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Albéniz and Benjamin’s Jamaican Rumba). Restricted by the injunction that one must be polite to passengers at all costs, I held my tongue (with some difficulty) and asked him sweetly to elucidate. ‘Well, I mean, popular classics, you know?’

‘No, no nice music, I’m afraid…’

 

But worst of all was the woman who, when we asked her how she had enjoyed her morning in Limon, spat out, ‘I was not impressed.’ All the disdain of centuries of ignorant colonialism in one short sentence. I was furious. Because I had felt ashamed, walking around Limon. There is so much that is admirable about Costa Rica – it has been a stable democracy since the late 19^th century, it abolished slavery in 1823, it disbanded its army in 1949 and has never reformed it, the country as a whole received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, 28% of it is set aside as national park. But despite its name, it is not wealthy, and when we walked around the streets we saw so much poverty. Most of the shops were selling cheap trash, the same stuff over and over again; the cafes were offering the most basic of foods (stew served up from big metal cauldrons); the roadsides were a mess, the buildings were rundown. Wandering those streets was fascinating, in a strange, guilty way – I’ve never seen anything like this before and there was so much that was picturesque. But we felt so obvious, so white and Western, intrusive. I guess the town needs tourists, but I wished I was a more educated and unobtrusive one. Yet people were so cheerful, helpful, patient with our halting Spanish; and the streets and buildings were colourful, full of life, noise, smells. We bought an iced coconut from a street seller. He cut the top off and stuck a straw in and we drank the cold milk. And we had good Costa Rican coffee in a little cafe (which had two machines, one, a filter machine, for American tourists, and an espresso machine for everyone else). And we bought a few beautiful hand-crafted things from the market at the port – which is only open to passengers coming off cruise shops, not to locals. They, apparently, are meant to buy the cheap plastic rubbish in the shops in the main street.

 

I was impressed by Limon. In French, I’d say it was impressionante – it made an impression on me.

 

 

 

15. Coffee in Colombia

So actually Cartagena is wonderful. Old, beautiful and colourful – every building is painted a different bright colour, with tiled roofs and big, curvy, Spanish-style balconies. There’s a wonderful old city wall, mostly along the harbour front, and as we were wandering along it we bought a mango from a street seller; he peels them and cuts them for you so you eat it like an ice-cream off the seed. And gorgeous women wander around in traditional dress with baskets of fresh fruit on their heads, which they then sell piece by piece – a little touristy but beautiful too. However, don’t ask for coffee at the restaurants. Even though Colombia produces most of the world’s coffee, what we were served – twice (we were hopeful) – was filter coffee served with hot condensed milk!! Sigh. We had a nice lunch though, in a little restaurant on the way back to the ship, out of the touristy old town – just rice and vegetables and fish, very simple, but nice – and we were also offered some fish soup as a starter, which was lovely – served with fresh lime.

And in the Museum of Contemporary Art – which we stuck our heads into only because it was a lovely old building and we were looking for some toilets – we discovered a rather amazing piano, a Pleyel, late 19^th century, with fine, fluted legs and gorgeous marquetry. And, surprisingly (in this hot, humid climate), it was not too badly out of condition. We both had a very nice time trying it out (and we gathered a bit of an audience, which was not bad practise for tonight’s concert!).

It feels so extraordinary to be on this new and very different continent. And for all we were nervous about being in Colombia, Cartagena actually felt very safe. It was relaxed and friendly; there were lots of police around but they too were relaxed, chatting with the locals and giving us directions. So we had a lovely wander, not just through the beautiful old city but also through the less pretty and more realistic (but still old and fascinating) suburban area on the way back to the ship. It is always such a lovely thing to try to talk to people, to search for a bit of the real life that goes on around the tourism. And in four hours ashore we only saw one sinister looking young man carrying a large gun.

14. Jamaican Rumba

At 6:30am yesterday morning I was probably the only person in all of greater London standing at a tram stop wearing a thick jacket and a straw hat. In the snow. It was one thing less to carry. It was then rather strange to be swimming on top of a ship under a full moon in Jamaica at 8:30pm that same night!

Virgin Atlantic has one particularly odd safety precaution. During takeoff and landing, nobody is allowed to hold their pillow or blanket on their laps. They must all be placed under the seat in front or in the overhead lockers. I had never really appreciated how much damage an unsecured pillow could do. In the event, once the pillows had been safely tied down for takeoff, we completely failed to go anywhere for two hours. The wings had iced up, and once they finished de-icing them someone went into a diabetic coma or something and had to be taken off, by which time the wings had iced up again. So it was a long day on the plane. And I was sitting in front of a tall man, who took violent objection to me putting my seat back a little to sleep (which I desperately needed; jetlag hit me hard this week). A couple of the stewardesses came along and tried to explain that passengers are indeed allowed to put their seats back (he yelled at them too) but by that time we had staggered off and found other seats – fortunately the plane wasn’t very full. As always happens on these occasions, we found ourselves directly behind him when we left the plane, then next to him at the luggage carousel.

We were actually officially in Jamaica for about thirty minutes (between walking out of the airport and boarding the ship), in which time Roy managed to lose his identity. The immigration staff at the port were fairly vague; the woman running the desk had to get her supervisor to come and turn on her computer for her. They eventually handed us back our passports, we headed over to the gangway where they checked them (in the dark) and handed us our crew ID. When we got to the crew office Roy was surprised to find that he’d been signed on as one Mr Roger Bryan… the immigration staff had given him back the wrong passport.

Our cabin is an inside one and is so small that when the keyboard is set up it takes up all the spare floor space. After the spacious cabin (with big porthole) on the other cruise, this feels a bit depressing! So we plan not to be in it very much. Being pretty dopey today, we’ve mostly been curled up in one of the lounges, alternately reading and working. We were also saddened to discover that the bar doesn’t have a proper coffee machine. My righteous resolution to forswear automatic coffee lasted about 30 minutes. I ordered a latte, but asked them to fill the glass only halfway (American style coffees, they normally come with half a litre of milk). What I got was a full glass that looked strangely like geological strata: pale and milky at the bottom, a darker band above, then the rest of it filled up with coffee-coloured water. Truly weird and completely undrinkable. I went back and explained that when I said ‘half-full’ I didn’t mean ‘half full of milk and half full of water’. The chap said that since I’d asked for less milk he’d put in three – three – shots of coffee instead. (they can’t have been real shots since it tasted like coffee-flavoured water). Anyway, upon my insistence that I really did want some empty air in my glass I got something that was still pretty dreadful but at least didn’t look like the record of a natural disaster in the Cambrian period. Tomorrow we’re stopping in Cartagena (Colombia), which is apparently quite a dangerous place… but the port area is meant to be ok, so we’ll risk dashing off the ship to find some Colombian coffee. Addictions drive us to strange things.

By the way, if anyone wants to do one of these cruises I recommend hiring yourself out as a guest speaker. You can talk about anything you like. As I’m write this sitting in the lounge, I can hear someone in the next-door theatre giving a presentation about airports, specifically what happens to you luggage once you say goodbye to it at the check-in counter. As I say, you can talk about anything.

 

13. (Even though it’s twelfth night…)

Back in London now, and I’ll start writing again… I couldn’t really call this a London Diary when I was in Paris or Australia (though I guess I did while we were on the cruise… and expect more reports soon since we’re about to head for Jamaica, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Mexico on another ship. I’ll try to steer clear of the monkeys.) Anyway, we’re here and yesterday I got snowed on for the first time in my life. Only very lightly, but I was excited. And today we went for a walk – a beautiful clear, sunny afternoon – and snow was still lying on tree trunks and paths and in corners of gardens. Even though it was sunny it was so cold that I could hardly speak, my jaw felt so stiff and frozen! And the sun stays so low… it staggers up about 8am then crawls along the horizon – by about 1pm the shadows are lengthening and the light makes it seem like evening. This lasts until about 4pm, when the sun finally flops down again. But on a day like this, winter is just gorgeous – the colours are so beautiful, and the cold is fresh and sharp and dry, exhilarating really.

However, I’m not displeased by the prospect of nicking off to Central America in four days time. Winter is great in small doses.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being on the one flight all the way from Melbourne to London. The good bit is that you don’t have to hang around an intermediary airport for six hours waiting for your connection. The bad bit is that when you squash yourself into your little cramped seat in Melbourne, you realise that this is where you are going to be stuck for the next 24 hours, which is not a comforting thought. And going via Hong Kong is about 2 hours more flying time than via Singapore… Still, the good bit was that the weather was very clear and we had some stunning views – it was daytime all the way from HK to London and we flew the northern route, over China and Russia and Scandinavia. So we saw some of the Himalayas, Siberia, Russia and northern Europe, all covered in snow. It’s so extraordinary to see the mountains from the air, the patterns and ridges and ripples, where the snow lies and where it doesn’t, where people live and where they don’t, how far down the Daugava River freezes (to just below Riga)… Quite amazing really. But the most amazing bit of all… I rocked up to the passport control at Heathrow, very nervous after what happened last time, and with my speech all ready – and then I was asked why I was here, I said I was on a working holiday visa, and the woman said ‘fine’ and I was through. I couldn’t believe it – I almost blurted out my conciliatory, grovelling, pre-prepared explanation anyway, because I’d been practising it so much and I was so braindead… but I managed to bite it back and run away as quickly as possible before she could call me back again!

Today I’ve been pottering, unpacking, playing the piano, cooking… and proof-reading the French translation for the Preface of Roy’s new edition of the Fauré Thème et variations, which arrived in the email today (French and German translations) and needs fairly instant response. For some reason most of the italicised titles in the French version had morphed back into Roman – rather a worrying thing to happen at final proofs, just before the thing heads off to the printer!