Kathryn and Jim

My phone bleeped the night before they arrived. "Important question number one. Do you have a hair drier". My former workchum Kathryn (that's Dr Vardy to you, if you turn out to be one of those idiots who assume that if she's in an office she must be the secretary) is practical and organised and if she hadnt become a biochemist might've made an excellent schoolmarm. She'd already emailed through a list of things she and Jim wanted to see, including a rubbish tip mountain of broken roman pottery that's apparently just near our house (so obviously I will know where it is...gulp), and I was beginning to wonder if I had at last met someone who could out-organise even me on a long weekend away.

Next morning, right on schedule, they texted as they were leaving the airport, and I bolted back from the Commissary, armed with proscuitto and other tasty goodness, to meet them on the station platform.

And from there, the weekend blossomed into one of the most spontaneous and chatty and quietly brilliant weekends you could ever imagine.

From lazy lunches and long walks, from the grandest sights of Rome to her least known, from aperitivo to after-dinner pints for the lads while Kathryn and I got down to serious natter about life, the universe, our evolving careers, the trials and triumphs of being breadwinner, our musical pursuits and the crazy things that people say and do.

Ants and Jim had never met, but they talk about as much as each other, and are both musicians and historians. Ants has been contemplating study and Jim has just finished a history degree, sitting an exam on ancient Rome just days before they arrived.

First stop on our adventures together was the Monte Testaccio - a 2000 year old mountain of millions of broken amphorae that were carted into the city filled with olive oil. Unlike other foodstuffs, the oil tended to soak into the clay, leaving it chalky, so the empties were stacked by the city gate, in a hill that today stands 8 or 10 stories high and has trees growing on it! We walked around the bottom of it, admiring the military cemetary on one side and contemplating climbing one wall to souvenir a fragment or two.

From there we hit the Forum, and the standard Saturday queues. Once inside we turned our minds to trying to build up the crumbling red brick into the palatial expanses of the imperial residence, from tiled courtyard pools to the audience chamber, more than 30 metres square and capable of seating 400 to dinner on triclinia - reclining couches.

Up to the resurrected imperial gardens, with amazing views of the Colusseum, and down to the civic buildings that I've walked past a dozen times, but never down amongst them. Temples, market places, triumphal arches... it all seemed much grander viewed from beneath, looking up, not down from the road.

I'll say more about the Colusseum later. But it rocked.

Also high on Jim's agenda was the Augustus mausoleum, older and much mor crumbly and overgrown than Hadrian's, further south, but close to one of the best aperitivo joints in town. Piazza Navona, Trastevere, the Pantheon... I fell in love with Rome all over again.

I heartily wished I could go with them on Monday as they headed off to the Vatican. Ants isn't keen, and I don't want to go alone, so some Saturday, I'll have to get myself up early...

By tuesday, our days of wining, dining, walking and talking were at an end. Jim and Kathryn left for a few days at Sorrento, leaving behind a cheeseboard with implements (totally unecessary, but inspired by a random comment that one day I really should get a smaller chopping board, for serving things on), and a warm glow that might just last all winter.