Neighbour Cat

October started out with a visit to Italy. First I stayed with Julia for an Up & Running workathon. This included a wee photo shoot to redo all the photos and videos in our running courses.

I’ve been busting to get them done professionally for years. Most of the originals were clumsily shot on my old iPhone 3 in the hallway of an Edinburgh hotel room, on the very first day I met Julia in person. We kept stopping and starting as the cleaner made her way in and out of the rooms with the vacuum cleaner.

They didn’t quite match my vision of perfection but if we’d waited for perfection we’d never have launched anything. I’ve often wrestled with the urge to apologise to our runners for the “rustic charm” of my multimedia efforts. But would apologising draw unnecessary attention to them? Or would silence suggest we didn’t know they looked a bit scruffy? That’s the sort of thing that keeps me awake. What is good enough? At what point do you release something into the wild?

Anyway, we finally budgeted in the photos and the Papermoustache dream team worked their magic. You can see from this photo of the photo how desperately professional help was needed. I managed to chop off the heads of both Julia and the random little dog that hung around us in the park.

After a fab few days with Julia I caught an assortment of trains and buses to San Gimignano. The Mothership was over for an epic tour of Italy, so we took the opportunity to meet up.

San Gimignano is a walled medieval hill town in Tuscany, kind of like a ye olde New York City. Except with lots of wild boar products and amazing gelato.

It was a very surreal time because the Tuscan views were so freaking Tuscan, with the pointy trees and vineyards and undulating hills… and then The Mothership was there. Twenty years ago the very idea of us somehow hanging out in Italy was unfathomable.

So I will always treasure those few days, where we quickly ditched the idea of any sightseeing and just wandered around the cobbled streets, chatting away. With a daily gelato stop, of course. Thank you, Mum.

I came home covered in mozzie bites. The remaining two thirds of the month were perfectly mundane, with Neighbour Cat still showing up on a regular basis, seated here in the Cat Loaf position…

… and the weather turning beautifully autumnal.