This posting is inspired by Cornelius's message on the previous page...

Yes, I have been thinking about how Rome and Deal are "different" now. Rome is in what I would call, recovery mode. The days after the funeral were marked by almost constant rainfall, which my landlady impressed on me were "tears for the Pope". There was a softness to the place, certainly, an exhalation perhaps after the previous tensions. The site of the Pope's tomb is now open to pilgrims who have been holding personal wakes there, praying and grieving (even if a little hurried through to prevent a repeat of the huge lines which gathered to see the Pope's body). Already people are travelling great distances to be there, and thousands queued throughout the night for its first opening.

The posters of John Paul - with the simple word "Grazie" - remain on the roadsides, and are still poignant, if a little more ragged from a battering from the elements. Even as I write, the Cardinals are meeting and the pollsters are predicting. But the city has accepted its loss, I think, and is preparing to move on. It is in a liminal state, even for non-Catholics, as the choice of Pope has political implications, of course. Rome and the Papacy are so conjoined it is hard to think of the City without a Pope. And yet, I have just come from Trajan's Forum, where people must surely have felt the same about a Roman Emperor: a person defined by place, and a place defined by a human figure...

As for Deal...it is now becoming a place of my past. When the house is sold I will return there as a visitor, with a limited sense of belonging. Last year, something instinctive in me wanted to scatter my father's ashes in the Channel, off the pier where he fished. But I remember thinking on that day, Easter Monday, 2004, how personal was the ritual; we were a knot of mourners while above us people were spendinga pleasant afternoon walking, fishing, enjoying the bracing air, perhaps curious as to what was going on below. Maybe some who observed recognised our actions, and the scene became part of their memory, too. Deal was, and is, a construct of the place from which my father came, where I lived and went to school, owned my first home, and married. But, without my parents there it takes on a different shape, it is memorialised.