I went into Miroslaw Balka's black pantechnicon at Tate Modern the other day. There is a descriptive panel, arguably a health and safety warning, alerting visitors to the feelings of disorientation they may experience in the total darkness, how they may blunder into others, or find themselves plunged into their innermost selves by such a complete lack of light.

It was not so. It was not completely black. Light faces were light faces, light trousers glowed. The occasional idiot switched on a mobile phone. Had the container been longer, narrower perhaps, with a smaller opening, or had people who failed to be black by nature been asked to don black IRA-style balaclavas and wear only dark clothes, mobiles confiscated at the entrance, then perhaps...

I first wrote about The Church in...I see...May 2008, and then again in February of this year. Well, my local very good rag, The Camden New Journal, has just told me that from next month The Church is leaving us, leaving The Forum, to re-locate in Clapham. (Is that easier for all those Kiwis and Ozzies to get to?)

After all the complaining, I instantly feel nostalgia coming on - although, come to think of it, can nostalgia be instant in any sense?

        "...night has fallen, and the barbarians haven't come.

        And some of our men just in from the border say

       there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution."

(C.P.Cavafy)

The other night I watched - and enjoyed - the bopic "Enid" on BBC 4. The setting seemed right, the clothes did, the acting was excellent, and whether or not the woman herself was a vile as she emerged has been much discussed. But that's not my beef. What really annoys me is how cloth-eared some writers (and presuambly script-editors - if such exist) are. Enid was made to refer to 'my readers out there.' Out there? Who in the 1930s or 40s would conceivably have said that? Later she said there was 'going to be a war on'. No one from her class, at that time, would have said 'a war on.' Then her poor, benighted husband mentions a 'business opportunity'!

Don't these writers read? Can't they hear the changing registers of language? Even I wasn't alive then but I can tell the difference between the language as it was used then and as it is now. But it's not only the words. It's the diction, too. The very young, and impressive child actor who played Enid's daughter Imogen would have been faultless had it not been for her pronouciation of one word: 'No.' It was a 21st century 'no', with all its multiple diphthongs. Surely, the director, James Hawes, could have coaxed a more period sound out of Ramona Marquez? Or perhaps he wouldn't recognise it either.

But on another subject entirely: Amnesty International's Christmas catalogue has just arrived. One of the attractions is a set of three Amnesty Low Rise Knickers (or boxer shorts)...with "Amnesty" embroidered/printed just below the navel. The mind boggles. Maybe this promises a business opportunity.

Just back from a wedding in Elba (or should one say on Elba?) – not the easiest place to get to from London: train/plane/train/train/bus/ferry/cab. There are direct flights from Germany because Elba is clearly a favourite with German tourists, and this was a German wedding. Well, I say German, but nothing is so simple.

The groom was a scion of a German publishing house, whose family have owned an island villa that dates back to Napoleon’s days, or maybe earlier, set in a shaded garden of some many acres, mostly planted up by the groom’s father in the years after the war. The bride was of Czech origin, who sought asylum in Germany at the age of 12. Their friends and relations had arrived from all over.

This was to be a civil ceremony in the capital, Portoferraio, so named because Elba was once celebrated for its exports of high-grade iron-ore (across the water at Piombino, where the ferries start out, AstraMittal have a rusty plant at the docks).

The municipio is in the Palazzo Comunale, stuccoed in apricot and ochre, with dark green shutters. Hefty black beams hold up the ceiling of the upstairs wedding room, whose windows give over the square. While the wedding is going on the door is kept open and the noise of people coming and going about their town hall business slightly muddles the matter at hand. On the wall behind the registrar is a tall portrait of Cosimo di Medici, who once briefly owned the capital and named it after himself, Cosmopoli. He smirks a faint challenge at Napoleon facing him at the other end, “this place is really mine, you know.” “Fine. Whatever. I never wanted to be here in the first place.” Napoleon spent 9 months here, in an odd sort of exile, apparently building roads and fortifications that in the end got him nowhere. Although it’s supposedly Napoleon that made the island famous, the little guidebook that we find on our hotel pillows as a welcome gift (among others) tells me that the islanders aren’t that impressed. When the annual mass is said for him, not many people show up – but then again, the book doesn’t say how many show up on other days either. Between these two temporary rulers sit a grand duke and duchess of Tuscany, one each side of a window. Opposite them a tiny, vestigial crucified Christ perches provisionally on the wall.

There are a few plush upright chairs for the bride and groom and sundry supporters, but mostly the guests are to stand. The registrar himself is slashed from right shoulder to left hip in, can it be, on an Italian state functionary, the German flag? and smiles with every line of his face. I have never seen a registrar so excited, so longing to perform his duties. By his side a family friend will translate the proceedings into German. To begin with there is a warm homily to the parents of the groom, both recently deceased, clearly major presences on Elba in the many years they holidayed here, and beloved of the registrar. He can’t wait to see this son happily wed. He can barely talk for smiling.

Even by English standards the ceremony is perfunctory. The registrar asks the couple to verify their names, asks them if they want to be married, and it’s done. Two old men, one on violin and one on guitar, scrape out old favourites – bit of Vivaldi, bit of Sinatra, bits of things everyone recognises but worryingly can’t name. The couple sign the register and the papers are handed, of course, to the bride who thinks they should have gone to her husband because he’s less likely to lose them. An Italian marriage certificate puts ours to shame. It’s huge, florally decorated, multi-coloured. You wouldn’t forget that in a hurry. You’d frame it rather than file it.

On the steps outside the guests have handfuls of rice to pelt the cowering newly-weds. In the photos they seem to be hunching under slanting rain. There’s a plaque on the wall, dated 1946, celebrating Elba’s release from unwanted fascism. Abbasso l’incitamento di odio e da vendetta, it says: Down with incitement to hatred and vengeance.

A long flight of ancient stone stairs conveniently nearby leads up town, seemingly constructed for wedding parties to cluster to order in the early autumn sunshine. Once the photographer is satisfied she has captured sufficient jollity, with everyone in it (if you can see the camera the camera can see you), we proceed to a terrace restaurant overlooking the sea.

Now this is clever. Large round tables whose white cloths are painful in the sun – they have to roll out umbrellas as protection for the eyes – are set without place names. Sit anywhere. Move around as you wish. The food is self-service from a long trestle table under an awning of palm leaves. And we get something that I don’t think we could in England. Four languages are on the go at once. German, Italian, Czech and English. Apart from one Czech and a couple of Italians there is no one who cannot speak at least two – only the bride is fluent in all four. And the guests slip from language to language, quickly gauging who in the current conversation doesn’t speak which one, switching to accommodate them. Nobody thinks this is showing-off because this is Europe, albeit a Europe of a certain sort, and of course you are a polyglot. How else could you function! Just as it should be.

Two small additional points:

1. Because bits of wedding celebration happened on different days a couple of us went for a walk, up down up down the wooded hills. Clearly, going for walks isn't an Italian thing to do. There are no path markings such as you'd find for ramblers in England, or better still in Germany or Czecho. When he feels so inclined the local farmer is quite happy to sling an electric fence across a path that's marked on the map. But this isn't my current beef. It's something else. Remember that ad on the box, for Bertolli Olive spread, which shows nubile and scrawny-shanked Italians leaping and pole-vaulting to catch each and every falling olive because the harvest is so precious? It's not true! We saw olives lying on the ground, scattered, uncollected under the trees. Surely the ad wasn't lying, was it?

2.Italian integrated transport. On the way out, as we got off the last train, the connecting bus was waiting to take us to the ferry. Great. Brilliant. Oh for this in England. But on the way back, the ferry arrived on time but docked 10 minutes late. The connecting bus, and indeed a train going in another direction, left bang on time - empty. The drivers must have been able to see the passengers leaving the ferry and making for the station(s). The integrated transport system works a treat, but best, apparently, without passengers.

The local libraries in our area are being rationalized and, finally, yanked into the 21st century. Senior levels of management will be de-layered; check-out will be self-service; librarians will be replaced by LCSOs - libraries customer service officers. Among the people in the Bibliographic Servies team losing their jobs will be the ones who order and catalogue the library stock. That stock will presumably be known as digital community learning utilities; books will be pre-digital community learning utilities - except that, of course, there won't be any books because the people who would have ordered and catalogued them won't be there any more.