Un altro litro di vino rosso per favore

Ciao tutti; no doubt you have already guessed where I am. That's right, I'm in Slovenia, trying to hunt down that accordion player who kept us awake all weekend at our hotel near the ski resort of Cervinia.

No, not really. I am, of course, in Rome, my most favourite of eternal cities. My purpose here is twofold (threefold if you take into account my insatiable appetite for saltimbocca and pan-fried ciccoria).

Firstly (and in reverse order) for the second half of the week I'll be attending a CMS ECAL testbeam workshop at Rome University. The workshop has been organised to review testbeam activities over the past few years, discuss results, and, I suppose, ponder how what we have learnt from these programmes can feed into the first operational phase of CMS later this year. For myself, I'm going along to glean as much information as I can in preparation for our ECAL Endcap testbeam in a couple of months.

Secondly, for the first half of the week, I'm visiting my colleagues at ENEA (CERN canteen: please please please be more like the ENEA canteen). I've been working with them on how irradiation affects the uniformity of the ECAL's lead tungstate crystals. Unfortunately, the programme of research we envisaged has been plagued with problems. Initially with the photodetector I brought from Imperial and then a bigger problem with the ENEA gamma ray source which took several months to fix (you can't just walk in there with a screwdriver). But that's the way it goes sometimes in all fields of research and now we have to get on with the information we have and focus on completing the endcaps for the first LHC phyics run next year.

ENEA have also been producing supermodules for the ECAL barrel and tomorrow we'll have a ceremony marking the completion of the final supermodule. I've packed a nice shirt and smart trousers for the ceremony (I've ironed the shirt mam) and I'm looking forward to the good food and wine that invariably accompanies such celebrations in Italy. It's very exciting (yes, I admit it) to see the detector very near to completion, but, I suppose, also a little sad as all the small collaborations that were formed over the years to build the thing start to dissolve.

Ah well. I'll be consoling myself in Da Lucia in Trastevere this evening with some spaghetti alla gricia and maybe I ought to try the tripe (a Roman speciality). I quite enjoy dining alone. Once the initial acute self-consciousness is conquered and the first half-litre of wine given a good home, it's pleasant to watch the other people in the restaurant (especially the struggling tourists discovering Italian cuisine has nothing to do with Hawaiian pizzas and spaghetti bolognese). Oh and one last thing; should the nice girl at the Hotel Posta near Cervinia be, by some amazing chance, reading this, I meant to say something really funny and not mumble "arrivederci" and my phone number is 004176...