Alexander Chancellor: I found the key to holiday happiness in a car park

While sitting beside a pool under a blistering Tuscan sun, I’ve been reading an article in Corriere della Sera about how to make the most of a summer holiday. The paper says that it isn’t enough to do what I have been doing — sweat, swim, sweat again, swim again, and then eat and drink too much — because this leaves you feeling gloomy when the holiday is over. Strongest in your memory, it claims, will be the last few days of the holiday, which are the most depressing ones because you are starting to dread the resumption of the usual drudgery at home. The answer, it says, is for your holiday to include at least one exciting and emotional event that will stick in the mind and give you something positive to remember it by. The trouble is that when the temperature rises to 40 degrees Celsius, as it has done here, you aren’t in the mood to do anything exciting. Even sightseeing is out of the question.

But I did have to drive an hour to Florence the other day to pick up somebody from the airport, and this turned out to be on the exciting side. First of all, perhaps because of the heat, I became confused about the directions and got lost in the northern suburbs of Florence amid which the little airport discreetly lurks. Then, when I finally got to the airport and picked up my guest, I found myself unable to leave it. The machine at the car park exit consumed my parking ticket but then rejected my credit card, with the result that the barrier didn’t lift and I had no ticket any more to explain my presence there. As hooting traffic built up behind me, I attempted to reverse my car out of the way but it mounted an unseen barrier behind me on which it came to rest, its back wheels several inches from the ground.