The waitress who served us was a ringer for Martha Jones. Geektastic.

Back from my other trip to Lake Como a week ago, but been too busy to note the fact. It was top. My mum's apartment in Lenno is 10 minutes stroll from Villa Balbianello. You may not have heard of it, but you may well recognise it. It was the site of the private hospital where Bond recuperated from having his testicles mashed up in Casino Royale. It was also the site of the excrutiating fruit-cutting-with-Jedi-mind-powers incident between Anakin and Padme in Attack of the Clones. Cheesy sci-fi associations aside, it is a fantastically pretty place.

Lake Como is just generally pretty. Since the Italians tend to render and paint all their buildings there's a certain timelessness to everything, the light is bright, and mountains are dramatic and, to an my eye, slightly frightening. In Britain we have mountains, obviously, but they don't have trees. They have fields, perhaps the odd sheep, a moor. But not trees. The mountains around Lake Como are densely wooded from the lake shore up to the snow line - look at these aerial photos of Lenno and compare them with the area around Wast Water. Couple that with a lake that's just mindbogglingly long and it all feels slightly unearthly.