A tale of three cities, my week has been, and each one of them offered me a lesson about first impressions - which can, of course, often be renewed. I was, for instance, by no means new to Manchester, where I went on the Monday, but my first impression of it this time was startlingly revisionist.
I had checked in at a hotel at Manchester airport and, standing at my window on its fifth floor, saw in the distance what looked like a prairie city of the American West. In the background the long line of the Pennines, half cloud-capped, suggested an outcrop of the Rockies, and when an intermittent shaft of sunlight illuminated the city centre with a sudden gleam, it really did seem to me like some eager young metropolis of the Newer World.
Was it a delusory vision? Yes and no. Manchester certainly has its fair share of dingy squalor, and it is probably very seldom that the sunlight picks out the heart of it with just that allegorical panache. All the same, when later that evening a spanking little Trans-Pennine Express took me into town on the last leg of its journey from Newcastle, I really did find the old place almost transatlantically buoyant.
Most of its people seemed to me about 20 years old, half its buildings seemed brand new, tandem trams gave its streets a continental air, people of all races abounded, a raffish sort of vigour predominated and the symbolical Victorian figures (Modesty? Prudence?) to be glimpsed through the downstairs windows of the Town Hall appeared to have turned their backs in resignation upon the sizzling scene outside, perhaps sensing that they might soon be replaced by images of the Beckhams.
I asked the most elderly passer-by I could find to remind me where the old offices of the Guardian had been, in the days when it was still the Manchester Guardian and I had worked for it. He looked back at me bewildered, as though I were Rip Van Winkle.
Next day, I went to Trieste - or rather, to ease myself into that poignant city of hopes and disappointments, I went first to have dinner at its most blithe seashore suburb, Muggia, round the bay.
This device worked a treat. The whole Adriatic bag of tricks welcomed me: mellow bells ringing, young bloods swaggering, ladies in black passing piously in and out of open church doors, grizzled old codgers gossiping. Nor was I in the least disappointed when I found my favourite restaurant taken over for a wedding reception: on the contrary, I thought the spectacle of the bride shyly posed for her photograph on a pile of fishing nets outside the door offered the happiest of prologues to the sweet melancholy of the city round the bay.
But when I proceeded into Trieste, I found the whole place in hysteria. Lights flashed everywhere. Loudspeakers reverberated. Helicopters rattled overhead and across the waters a mighty mechanical roar made the sea itself shake. It was the climax of the Off-Shore Powerboat Championship! Gigantic trucks from Norway or Dubai jammed the streets, bronzed mariners thronged the bars, and what shook the sea turned out to be the mass accelerations of a dozen of the most useless, the noisiest, the most childish, the ugliest and most arrogant vessels ever made by man.
Next day, I expounded to the assembled delegates of the 18th International James Joyce Symposium my vew of Trieste as a city of hopes and disappointments.
On Friday, it was Venice. For years I have been preaching the heresy that on the whole it would be best to let Venice sink. It is a solution of impossible perfection, I know, but when I stepped off my vaporetto at San Marco it seemed to me at first that the incalculable mass of humanity swarming through Venice that day really was making the Serenissima terminally irredeemable.
This new first impression especially saddened me because I had come to Venice to start work on a book - a book not to be published until after my death, making me a posthumous author before my time.
I had hoped that the magic of the place would inspire me in this maudlin task. I stumbled here and there looking for somewhere to write, half-deafened by competing cafe orchestras, jostled by coveys of Japanese ladies in plastic sun-visors, importuned by gondoliers and men from glass factories, sweating with the heat and dazzled by the evening sun, until at last I arrived at Harry's Bar.
They brought me white wine and then I wrote a first paragraph. They brought me scampi thermidor with rice and rocket salad, and I wrote a few pages. They made a zabaglione for me, with a lump of vanilla ice-cream in the middle of it, and lo, the old Venetian magic worked after all, and I knocked off the whole first chapter of my after-song, straight from my grateful heart.
I left that blessed hostelry vinous and fulfilled, and, dear God, said I to myself, how could you ever have wished this place to sink?
Look at all these lovely people! Hear the sweet music of the cafes! See the kiddies feed the pigeons!
And then, when I walked once more into the piazza, and found the basilica all light and fancy there, and the campanile in noble silhouette above me, I felt the tears well up once more, as they did when I first set eyes on that divine spectacle, a thousand first impressions ago.
