Do you remember the episode of Blackadder The Third when Samuel Johnson turns up at the palace with his new dictionary? (If you can’t, watch it here.) Edmund tries to catch him out by offering the wise doctor his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities“. Well, someone in Italy has offered theirs. Kind of.

I wasn’t sure if the comment below was spam or not. The WordPress filter is, however, pretty effective and it’s not often that one slips through the net. Being written in Italian didn’t help. Sent from someone going by the name of Olimpia Venditto (is it you?), it was posted on the Pompey2Pompeii post of a couple of weeks ago. Here it is;

Sto seguendo la vostra dura sfida fase dopo fase e posso dirvi che sono molto ma molto osgogliosa e fiera di voi. Siamo tutti in fibrillazione per il vostro arrivo

I ran the text through Google translate and it gave me the following;

I’m following your last challenge step by step and I can tell you they are very, very proud of you and osgogliosa. We are all in fibrillation for your arrival.

The last sentence made me smile. The fibrillation (defined, incidentally as ‘the rapid, irregular, and unsynchronized contraction of muscle fibers’ according to Wikipedia) has clearly been incurred by the cyclists heading to Pompeii. They have just arrived in Pisa or at least I think they have. If I’m incorrect on that point, I am of course anaspeptic, frasmotic, even conpunctuos to have caused them any pericombobulations. And so is Edmund no doubt.