... the Internet is magic.

OKAY, so, back in 2007 I went on a school trip to Rome for a long weekend. On our one free early-afternoon I ended up getting to spend much less time at San Clemente than I'd intended, because Italian lunch hours, which in turn lead to me and the others I was with eating one of the best restaurant meals I had ever had for astonishingly little money, and it was only as we were leaving that we noticed the discreet stickers on the door about the place having been voted best-restaurant-in-Rome the preceding two years running.

My mother will be in Rome next weekend.

My mother, who remembers me rhapsodising about this place, asked me if I could recall the name.

... as it happened, I could remember (1) that the name started with an N and (2) the approximate walking route to get to it from San Clemente. Ergo five minutes with online maps later I had identified La Naumachia as the most plausible candidate, despite a rebrand having apparently done away with the very memorable logo of a ship. I look forward to hearing her report on it.

(Having explained how I found it, she responded: HAH!!!! That's the sort of thing I do. Indeed it's how the rat I ever found the same hotel I stayed in back then.... you come out of the back gate of the Inquisition past the best water fountain in Rome, go under a bridge past a dubious bus stop and up the hill most of the way to the next metro station....)

[poem] Everything happens for a reason:

As a species, we are dedicated
to post hoc rationalisation:
the tidying away of inconvenient emotion
the reduction of the self
to an ordered
             sequence
                     of steps.
If this, then that. Well, no:
everything happens for a reason.
The reason, though, does not come carved deep into stone
(every conceivable dictator
being characterised by sublime indifference):
but is rather what you make of it.
This is what it means to tell the story of your life:
to take your whys and somehow give them form.
This is the solid ground of poetry:
two roads diverged; think, two things, both at once:
and every meaning you create is true
or true enough for now. Is this about...?

Yes. Yes, it is.

If only for this moment, we
are mirrored mirror twins.
I only wish I'd any clue
along which lines I'd break.