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...

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)

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.

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.

We've been marking this on telly, on radio, in the press, and (rightly) making a deal of the fact that although Putin made a speech in which he said that the Pact was "an error" he took the edge off what looked as if it might have been approaching an apology by saying, 'It wasn't just us! Lots of other people were making pacts with Germany, and had been for ever such a long time.'

What I find interesting about this is (correcct me if I'm wrong) we didn't talk about this 10 years ago, at the 60th anniversary, or 20 years ago at the 50th. Have our media only woken up to what happened to Poland because it's now a member of EU? For shame!

On the way in, though, before we got to the Cottesloe, we leaned on the balustrade by the river and watched a bespectacled youngish man in sand coloured cut-offs and a fatigues-green T-shirt creating 'spontaneous art' in the sand of the river beach below while the tide was out. He had a long-handled plastic spade, a garden trowel and a wooden cooking spoon for his tools to mould a landscape of eroded shapes, stroking them smooth with his palms, to look like a microcosm of the hills and chasms of millennia of geology. He'd planted a twig that must have floated his way in the sand nearby. Under the parapet he had spread a pink bed- sheet and a curtain to catch the coins that, with luck, passing punters looking down from above would chuck in his direction. A couple of plastic buckets and a small linen basket stood in readiness for his loot.

By the time we came out into the sun the tide was well on its way in and most of the hills and valleys had been washed away. Spontaneous art, like the planet, is perhaps temporary. He was still at it though, digging out what appeared to be the impress of a dinaosaur's foot, but above it he had raised a mound with a neat, deep hole in it. Into this he inserted a lit tea light candle, then began to pick up the afternoon's coins. Given that it seemed as if the steps down to the waters edge were locked, this artist had respumably sought permission to set up on the sand. Is there, I wonder, a Thames Water Authority Spontaneous Art Department for issuing permits...?

Further along the river, almost out of sight, but close to the approaching, returning river, sat a black man, or possibly woman, young, with close-cropped hair, bulbous red shirt and baggy trousers, or possibly skirt, gathered up round the thighs. S/he smiled to him/herself with a wide, white-toothed delight, facing into the water, and from time to time seemed to shout out, 'Praise the Lord.' I hope s/he removed himself while there was still land to walk on.

I sat by the river and read my book. waiting for my daughter to ring me and tell she was leaving work. She rang. I said Isabella Street. She said yes. Meet you there shortly. So back I went but could not get in. The street was barred by blue and white police tape; police cars; a van with a satellite dish and a camera atop a periscope swivelling about like ET. The forensics were there too, in their paper jump-suits and overshoes, massed uniform asking everyone questions. Has someone been murdered? I asked. But the policeman wouldn't tell. There's been an incident, he said, which I had more or less guessed.

So we sat opposite at a table on the pavement. And watched. And had a nice-ish Turkish meal (my fish better than her chicken), and only later considered it odd that we should have done so while there might have been a body lying there somewhere.

But there wasn't. This morning I read that a man on a bicycle had taken a couple of pot shots at a pair of passing coppers, then dumped the bike and legged it, all through Isabella Street. One of the coppers was a little hurt, perhaps not by the bullets so much as the chase. It all happened about 2 minutes after I had investigated to see if Isabella Street was still there. But how solipsistic is that! What difference does it make whether I was there then, or not at all? It's how we are, though, isn't it.

Today. Still no trials for me, although others traipse happily back and forth, jurying. Finally teacher calls me to her desk. I am to be released, entirely. How usual is it, I ask, for someone to attend jury service for two weeks and not to be on a single trial? It never happens, she says. Well, I say, it's just happened to me. I can hear I am sounding plaintive. I have been randomly and serially rejected by a computer, and I mind.

But being a rationalist, I must not mind. Instead, I think about what I have been reading, and the fact that every day, walking a different route from Kentish Town to Southwark, I have seen parts of the City I did not know. It was almost worth it. No. It WAS worth it.

Names are called out and told they can go home, but come back tomorrow. One man of truly enormous proportions, plugged into his iPod, asks plaintively how 'they' decide who's going to be called and who not. It doesn't seem worth entering into a conversation about computers and random selections. Then he's told he can go home. The rest of us are to wait because there will be a trial for us after all. After an hour or so we are taken up.

The old lag was right. My name was called last and I am one of the three rejects. But we have to sit in while the others are sworn in case there should be some real objection to any individual juror. The defendants (two) are neatly be-suited for the occasion, or perhaps always. The only scruffy types around are the jury. Not a dock officer in sight, so maybe this pair isn't thought to be dangerous. The public gallery has two people, both blondes - girlfriends, perhaps. His Honour gazes with bleak weariness at his new jurors. 10 of them swear on the Bible. There are 2 affirmers. One of the other rejects would have chosen the Koran he says, every bit as fed up as I am. We leave without the faintest idea what they charges are.

If I didn't know about the randomness I'd think I'm getting closer. But randomness being what it is, every throw of the computer's dice starts from scratch.

My route to London Bridge Station brings me out at the back of the London Dungeons. A young female victim of torture on a break, with tears of blood streaking her cheeks, is checking the messages on her phone. Her colleague, male, in a red wig flaming like terror - a wig I saw on a different man yesterday - is dragging in the tourists with a voice from the grave, deep bass and rolling with gravel. Yesterday's man's voice was identical. I suppose the microphone feeds their patter through a dungeonesque distorter.