I feel sure everyone will have abandoned reading my poor meagre writings after my more-than-two week vacation, but nonetheless I better get myself into gear, and make some explanations for my neglect.

I've been on Corsica, where internet access is hard to find and frightfully expensive. Enough explanation? Also, their keyboards are funny, and whatever I wrote would have looked a little like a foreign language.

I've been asked by a few people, "Why Corsica?" Having been there, I have to admit that my initial reasons don't really stand up - but that's okay, because I found a myriad of other reasons along the way as to why it'ssuch a beautiful place. But I admit that the only reason I thought of it originally was as a result of having read too much Dumas over the past few years - after all, the fabulous Count of Monte Cristo is originally a poor jilted Corsican boy, who takes rather spectacular revenge. As someone who chose to read Washington Square in Washington Square is it so surprising that it was a book that led me there? Anyway, I thought, not knowing Dumas's biography that perhaps he had had something to do with Corsica - sadly mistaken. It was simply fashionable to write about the place amongst nineteenth century French writers, and Dumas wasn't the only one who jumped on board. Must now chase up whatever Balzac had to say about the place.

We ended up seeing quite a bit of the island - but not enough! The guide books say that in two weeks you should be able to see almost everything, but I don't think people are actually looking if they see "everything" in so short a time. We caught the ferry from Italy (Livorno) to Bastia, and stayed in Calvi, Bonifacio, Ajaccio and Corte - the most visited places. But there is so much we didn't see - not just in the towns we didn't get a chance to visit, but in the places we stayed for a few days.

My favourite fact about Corsica came from Felicity (she got it from a guidebook): apparently at some point the French government tried to cut down all the chestnut trees on Corsica because it was thought the trees encouraged laziness. A whole family could live on one tree, so no-one was particularly keen on knuckling down to hard work. The plan didn't succeed, and even though I wouldn't venture to call them lazy, I could see the Corsicans were pretty laid back. Especially over lunch. A lot of shops close for three hours over lunchtime - not because they take a siesta, but because Corsicans "believe it is their God-given right to eat a proper lunch." And good for them.

It didn't feel at all French: people spoke French, but somehow the place is simply its own. No-one looked down on our attempts to communicate in French - as they didn't understand English they simply waited to see what we'd come out with, and somehow we made ourselves understood.

It's also a bit of a Napolean-fest, because he was born there, and all the souvenirs are delightfully kitsch - a lot of them in the shape of the island, and endless Napolean statuettes and busts and playing cards to be had. We walked past the house he was born in a number of times in Ajaccio. Calvi has its own share in military history - Horatio Nelson lost his right eye there in battle. Felicity and I stormed the citadel with our baguettes in remembrance of this event.

When we got into Ajaccio, on going out for a large dinner, we stumbled across a poster advertising "Tempus Fugit", a concert of polyphonic Corsican chant taking place the following night at the Cathedral. Best of all it was free: and it was one of those extraordinary musical experiences that come unexpectedly. It was an a capella concert, five male voices. The music, I have to say, was not polyphonic in texture - it was a definite homophony - but harmonically it was fascinating. Many of the pieces were structured around a single ascent or descent, and the melodic shifts were very chromatic, very intricate. A sense of a home key was often in flux, and then every so often a very western, very classical, scalic passages would emerge. I couldn't tell with most pieces whether they were sacred or not - every so often there would be a recognisable angus dei - and I wish I'd understoof more. But the music was compelling - sometimes so close to something familiar: and in those similarities somehow more strange: as if music history broke off at some point, and departed down a different fork in the road, occasionally hearing gossip from the main road and passing it on, a little bit garbled.

We had our share of mishaps too. In the first week, in Calvi, we went swimming - it was my first time in the Mediterranean, and something to remember. We swan off the rocks below the citadel, and even though we only lasted a few minutes (I can't tell you how icy that water was in April) Felicity cut her foot. Our first injury! In Bonifacio, wandering out of the Marine Cemetary and into a Potter's shop I had a disagreement with a dog almost as big as me. The pocket on my pants was a sad victim, as were both knees, which a few later turned black. In Corte I got very ill, and spent a day lying in bed, napping and reading Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment), and feeling very sorry for myself. In a feverish state I think I got overly involved in poor Rodya's thoughts and fears, so I found it a peculiarly intense experience!

I've also been reading more Henry James - finished The Wings of the Dove my first few days on Corsica, and continue to apologise for all the bad things I said about him. I've figured out what makes his sentences so complicated: it's his peculiar devotion to inserting as many commas as is humanly possible into them. For a few days it felt slow, and like work - then the last 150 pages seemed like some kind of dream, some immense recapitulation bringing the themes of Kate & Merton and Molly together in the home key. Or as though these themes were laid one over the other, perhaps, and played some entirely new, and transcendental music. The perfect coming together, like the momentum of placing the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was another extraordinary experience, being so engrossed in this book where the shifts and drama are so internal, so psychological.

I also read Madame Bovary - I understand why Flaubert is so revered now, though twitty Emma and I didn't get along I'm afraid. When I ran out of reading on Corsica I bought Stevenson's Kidnapped. I have to admit that I'm finding it singularly tiresome, and have begun reading a biography of Carson McCullers to avoid having to finish it - though I know I will finish it, eventually. Then I can rid myself of it most gratefully. The McCullers biography hailed as the "first truly popular biography" - interesting to find out all the facts of her life, but written in a frustrating style. The author is always having arguments with the previous biographers: now I know this is the nature of biography, and the reason why more than one biography is often written about the subject, but she writes these arguments so defensively, and is constantly upset by suggestions that there may have been some ambiguity in McCullers sexuality: in making such a defense against her lesbianism/bisexuality she is simply making even more of the notion than previous biographers, and writes as though these suggestions somehow muddy the achievement made by McCullers. But it's all there in the sentences of her books, which unfold like music. So while she's busy arguing with her predecessors, I'm busy arguing with her, and it occasionally makes for some very noisy reading.

Now I have arrived in Florence - but that's another story...

Florence