I begin writing this in an Austrian inn while a blizzard swirls noiselessly outside. It is nearly mid-March, and like the Austrians themselves I have been taken completely by surprise by the weather. The locals claim that by rights spring should be in the air, yet most nights the temperature sinks to minus nine celsius and it snows much of the time. Everyone is phlegmatic, but I am also stuck. Because I drove up from Italy on summer tyres my car, a white lump hunkered outside, has become a death trap. Tomorrow, inconveniently, the inn is closing until Easter and in one way or another I shall have to leave. My host blows apologetically through his moustache and plies me commiseratingly with Obstler, his home-made fruit schnapps. But go I must.