I love the sound of breaking glass

But I'm not so keen when it feels as if I have a throatful of the stuff. Two badly-disturbed nights and my feeling-sorry-for-myself meter is off the scale.

So let's think of nice things, like the short break we took in Camogli on the Golfo Paradiso on the Ligurian coast. Its name roughly means houses of wives, referring to the wives who stayed at home while the husbands went out to fish. It's still a fishing village but now also popular with tourists. Very popular as we discovered on the days we were there!

View over the bay from our apartment - up the hill

On the Sunday we took a boat ride around the coast a short way to the small and beautiful cove of San Fruttoso, site of a Benedictine abbey dating from the tenth century. It's only accessible by boat or a long hike and you have to wonder why. I guess that monks for you.

The remains of Saint Fructuosus, who was martyred in the third century, are still kept in the abbey. As you can see the beach, such that it is, was a little over-crowded. Not much respect here for anyone wanting their own personal space. Quite different from what it must have been when first built. It's easy to imagine the early monks in peaceful prayer and meditation.

Between San Fruttoso and Camogli is a famous underwater bronze statue, Christ of the Abyss. We travelled on the ferry further out to sea so didn't see it - apparently it can in the right circumstances be seen from sea level - but it's popular with scuba divers and the idea of the statue was, in fact, first mooted as a tribute to an early Italian scuba diver.

On Monday we took the train along the coast to Sant Margherita, another pretty Ligurian town with some rather fine statues including this one of Columbus, who, of course, came from Genoa, just up - or possibly down - the coast.

Husband showed the grandchildren how to use their hands to make the water spurt out at Granny. Such fun!

What I particularly loved was the trompe l'oeil on many of the houses in both towns. My attempts at capturing the effect weren't very successful but on some houses you honestly had to look hard to work out if they were really were windows.

This was just a particularly fancy one but even the lines you see above the arches are just painted - it's not brickwork