Boyling!

How are you? What on God’s green Earth are you up to nowadays?

My sincerest apologies for the horrendous tardiness of this my latest dispatch, ol’ chum, but as you shall soon see I have had other things on my mind lately besides catching up with my correspondence.

I would like to commence, however, with a far more mundane topic, if I may. In your last letter you made two enquiries that I would like to address. First off, the Carnevale… What an amazing spectacle it was. You experienced some of the madness and mayhem that Venice has to offer when you came to visit me, and I am so very pleased that you chose to. We certainly accumulated a mound of anecdotes to share with our future spawn, not to mention a plethora of memories that we had better not. Like that night in the Calle dei Fabbri with the triplets from Barcelona… But I’m digressing! What I meant to say was that the hoopla you bore witness to during the New Year’s celebrations was nothing compared to the hullabaloo of the carnival. It seemed as though the entire world had chosen to disembark in this heavenly port to soil it with their corrosive lack of finesse and sub-human absence of mind. No, I found that beatitude and jocularity were best pursued elsewhere than on the streets alongside the local peasantry and commoners from across the sea – although I did partake in quite an assortment of public festivities apart from the obvious and obligatory ‘limited access’ engagements I was invited to. In short, the carnival was a tremendous success and dressing up in the confection and manner of Louis XIV was simply marvelous. (I have no doubt that you shall gawp in express awe when you see the photographs I had Sordo take of me.)

Your second question, I intend to answer in haste. What is a merry theme for a festive occasion? Five words, my friend: Bacchantic Underwater Circus Grape Orgy!

In conclusion, my excuse… Shortly after your departure from my hospitable embrace and your return to the murky cold of the North, I was summoned by one of His Majesty’s contacts here on the island, a direct descendent of the last doge of Venice, mind, who told me of a mission of great importance. I can’t go into detail at this point, but it sounded like a challenge to me, so I accepted the responsibility of safeguarding our beloved Blighty – and indeed in some far-fetched way the balance between good and evil – and ventured to (you won’t believe your eyes when you read this) NewNose Harbour. That’s right, to the estate of Lord Jamés. He, too, had been summoned by H.M.’s local contact, codenamed “TAT”, an acronym of some sort, to partake in the mission on his front, and I was given the possibility to confer with Tat at painstaking length and detail, once sitting down for over eight hours to incorporate his views into my own! In any event, I left Lord Jamés in NewNose Harbour and returned to Venice, taking with me a particular black leather satchel and Tat, too. He is now a guest at Ca’ Ponkelino, as once you were. For obvious reasons I must keep this brief. But rest assured, my fellow libertine, further details will follow as the mission progresses, perchance even a letter sometime very soon, when all is done and I might forgo all this dreadful cloak-and-dagger banter…

A Presto and Pip-Pip!

Your friend,

Ponkleton