In April 1986 I took a trip to Italy with my then-girlfriend.

It is all deeply ironic. The decade was characterised personally by my full-time work for the Buddhist organisation with which I was affiliated. Well, more than that: the Order into which I was ordained. Much of this time I was chairman of the Buddhist Centre in London. On paper it should have been a recipe for non-stop growth and inspiration. The reality is that during that decade I saved my life with regular visits to Italy.

I can recall six for sure, it might be seven. Where the money came from for such events I'm not sure. But the reason for these ventures south of the Alps was that I was deeply in need of inspiration. This life devoted to breathing Buddhism failed to provide me with richness and colour. Life and work in London was grey, grey, grey. It was Apollo in the worst sense. I needed spontaneity, exuberance, a bit of Dionysian craziness. Italy - the art, the culture, the weather, the people - filled the gap. And at times the gap seemed huge.

We went to Padua in northern Italy. I was typically a bit down and depleted. I had a really bad tooth, and may have been taking antibiotics. I was normally a pizza monster, but I remember sitting in this pizzeria having great trouble wrestling with a simple margherita or something.

After a couple of days we moved on, the short distance to Venice. After a couple of visits to Italy, I came to see that Venice was the place for me. Its moods, its atmospheres, its waters, out of peak season at least.

It was one morning around breakfast time that this middle-aged Italian guy bustled into the dining room in a state of great agitation. He was brandishing a newspaper, and gesticulated madly at the article on the front page. My Italian was pretty rubbish - though somewhat better than my girlfriend's - but I captured enough to make out the gist of what this man with the wide and wild eyes was trying to convey. There had been an explosion. It was big, it was serious. It was at a nuclear plant. It was in Russia at a place called Chernobyl.           

We didn't do very much. I mean, what do you do? A nuclear reactor's just gone up in smoke. Sounds pretty bad; but what do you actually do?

We did the only sensible thing, and got on with our holiday....

April readied itself to melt into May. After a few days of wandering atmosphere-soaked backstreets and gawking at the Titians, it was time to move on.

Threading its way down the Adriatic Coast south of Venice is a string of small (at least in 1986 they were small) seaside resorts. We had rented an apartment in one of them for a week of sun, sand, and sea; much-needed relaxation for the responsibility-laden Buddhist that I felt myself to be at the time.

The location was idyllic. A long line of slender pine trees separated the apartment block from the pure sand beach and the blue blue sea. 

First up, however, the apartment needed to be made habitable. It had been closed up since the end of last season, probably seven months before. In the meantime northern Italy would have endured the damp and cold typical of winter and early spring there - think Milan, Bergamo, February 2020. The owner probably lived in Milan, and hadn't visited since, so the whole place was as damp and musty as a tenth-hand bookshop. So our first day was spent thoroughly airing the place, chucking the mattress out onto the veranda to dry in the sun. And then it was time for the beach.

The weather was perfect but, apart from the two of us, the sand was deserted. It felt bizarre. I had misunderstood the Italian collective mentality. The passion and colour of Italy I had mistaken for Dionysian spontaneity. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, the culture is anything but crazy and Dionysian. It is highly regulated, regimented, uniform.

You see, early May is not yet beach season. So people don't go to the beach, even if the weather is perfect. There will be a day - end of May, early June, I guess - when seaside season begins. And then everyone will be there. In those horrible organised parasol-and-sun lounger blocks, designed to eradicate any sense of the wild and the natural from the essentially wild and natural experience of being out in nature and on the beach.

So day after sun-soaked day we lay out there, alone in the sun. It was always there, at the back of my mind: the radiation from Chernobyl. What was going on? Was a radiation cloud drifting across the skies of northern Italy? Was I turning myself into some kind of time-lag frying machine? I didn't know; and the question remained just there, at the back of my mind.

It was a hunger, a thirst, an elemental need: the sun. In the 1980s, at any rate. I was just like a character out of a D.H.Lawrence novel. "Take her to the sun" orders the doctor in one of these stories, to the pale, tormented, sun-starved husband, about his pale, tormented, sun-starved wife. I had to get out of my paleness, out of the grey living death which seemed to be life in London. I had to get out of my head, into feeling, into the body. It was existential. And it had to be done, even if I risked slow death by radiation....

How serious was Chernobyl in the end? Almost impossible to say, I suspect. How do you measure the impact, after ten, twenty, thirty years? From what I could make out, any radiation fell more over the mountains of Scotland than over the Italian Adriatic. But who's to know, really? It made for good anti-Russian propaganda, that's for sure.

I'm still here. I have yet to die from any kind of cancer. Last I heard of my former girlfriend was about five years ago, when she had suffered a short-term stroke, but had recovered.

The future's uncertain, as Jim Morrison sang; and the end is always near. Maybe, Jim, maybe. Who's to know? 

Images: Venice; Marina Romea nowadays, in high season; Po Valley in winter.