Two weeks ago, readers left me sitting on a rooftop bar in Florence with my best mate, overlooking the Duomo, drinking a limoncello spritz with a stomach nicely lined with seven courses by Michelin star Chef Sardi Antonello.
You’d only be human if, after a year of travel columns, you silently wished for some calamity might befall me, a plague or pestilence or maybe just a bad oyster. And if you’re in the mood for some schadenfreude, you're in luck, because the next day, I woke up in that beautiful Florentine villa with my face so red and swollen that I looked like Sloth from the Goonies.
I initially just did what any Scottish woman would do, I slapped on a bit more warpaint, a giant pair of sunnies and ordered a medicinal Campari and soda. But my face became more alarming, not to mention painful and when I went to a pharmacy, first a stylish wooden-panelled apothecary in Florence with a pharmacist who looked like he'd been chiseled by Michelangelo himself, and then the slightly more mortal but very helpful chap at Boots in Heathrow, they all looked at me and said with different accents but equal horror, "You need to see a doctor!"
This obviously wouldn't be a problem. Except that mums do not get two nights........