Connections

We were sitting outside Baccaro, Woking’s premier Italian watering hole, when we notice a new bookshop cum cafe across the road. Been open a month apparently, so 0/10 for us in terms of observation skills. Lovely people and all their cakes are vegan. We bought books, of course. I think I now have enough reading to last me a year.

Baccaro is run by a guy called Adam who is English by birth but Venetian by adoption, having lived and worked there for many years. Woking and Venice are very similar in that they both have canals and coffee shops. The Italian community locally is quite large and goes back several generations, many coming from Mussomeli in Sicily to work in local farms and businesses after World War Two. A lot of people from the same Sicilian town went to form a community in Buffalo, New York, which is also similar to Woking in that it has tall buildings and a vibrant art scene.

Apart from our trip into town we had a fairly chilled day. I finished reading The Invention of Nature (a superb book about the explorer and scientist Alexander Humboldt) and started reading The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Woking is very similar to Istanbul in that both have Turkish barber shops and a lot of kebabs.

That may be a comparison too far.

Good day.