Melanie Sykes Has Flew Back To Venice To Reignite Her Gondolier Romance And We Are Obsessed

What’s getting you through the tiers (sorry) these days? Is it getting stuck into your 800th boxset since March? Getting stuck into your 8000th bottle of wine since March? A spot of retail therapy to distract you from the doom-laden statistics about our country’s handling of the second wave of the Coronavirus pandemic? Or maybe you’ve just spent the day scrolling through pictures of Melanie Sykes and her holiday romance with a gondolier in Venice. If it's the latter then you're not alone.

Ever since Mel was spotted hooking up with Gondolier Riccardo Simionato (who at 23, is 27 years younger than she is) on a six-day trip to Venice (and continued to see him for the rest of the trip) the papers have been AWASH with reports on their romance. Today, they returned in full force after Mel returned to Venice to reunite with her not-so-holiday romance and had another full-on snog sesh as he sailed her round the canals. How did she get out of the you know, national lockdown, to rekindle her Gondolier flame?

On paper, it makes no sense. 'Travelling away from home, including internationally, is restricted from England except in limited circumstances such as for work or for education,' reads the government website. Has she argued that she's educating this 23-year-old in the art of love?

If she wasn't working out there (which wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility) the fine for going on holiday during the national lockdown is £200. You can imagine that's not exactly a big dent in her savings either way. When it comes to arriving in Italy, the government website says 'you must show evidence that you tested negative for COVID within the 72 hours before your travel. Do not use the NHS testing service for a test to travel to Italy. You should arrange to take a private test.'

Whatever happened, whether or not Mel broke lockdown rules doesn't seem to be the focus of the tabloids. Reports are instead obsessed with their age gap and the possibility that his mother was a similar age to Mel. After Mel's original holiday to Venice in October, they published pictures of them snogging by the canal, and concluded by noting that she returned home on her own at the end of the holiday.

I think the vibe we were meant to take from all of the reports is that it’s SHOCKING that a woman of Mel’s age - a mother no less - was galavanting around on her own and getting her jollies by developing an intimate knowledge of the local dialect (the dialect being LOVE guys, keep up).

And maybe in other circumstances pictures of her snogging a gondolier in Venice might have felt a bit.. much? A bit on the nose? But right here, right now, in the dying embers of 2020 and possibly planet Earth, Mel Sykes having a cliched holiday romance with a younger man and it being splattered all over the papers is exactly what the Chief Medical Officer ordered.

For one thing, she looks like she’s having the best time. And for those of us who’s only break this summer was a rainy five days camping in Bognor Regis, the idea of decamping to an Italian city, staying in a proper hotel where someone else makes your breakfast, drinking limoncello and getting off with a random local sounds like total heaven.

And secondly, there is no woman on Earth who makes being 50 look as fun and sexy as Melanie Sykes. She’s constantly falling down a bad-man sex hole and alerting the world to it leaving sexy comments on her latest beau’s Instagram posts, and always seems to be having a great time with it. Obviously it helps that she’s absolutely stunning and has also managed to invent a serum that miraculously halts the ageing process in her spare time. But as someone whose 40th birthday is looming, there’s no better advert for the fifth decade of your life as a woman - and beyond - than Melanie Sykes snogging a 23-year-old gondolier - (with tongues!) - by a canal in Venice.

Ultimately, Melanie Sykes has just the sort of DGAF attitude that we could all do with embracing in these troubled times. When news of the story broke, she responded on Instagram saying that she was 'experiencing so much joy that it was difficult to care.'

And it seems like Twitter hard agrees. In another time, and another place maybe the h8rz would have come out to give Mel a hard time for her holiday romance, but the general consensus this weekend? More power to Melanie Sykes and her frolicking fun, and we’re all rather jealous actually.

So maybe there are a few life lessons from this we need to take into Q4 2020 with us:

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