Missing Mojo.

Now that I’ve turned sixty-eight, I seems the Guardian no longer loves me. On Tuesday, mildly irritated by a reader’s patronising letter oozing smug, self-satisfied, and totally unjustified, cultural superiority I sent a pin to prick his bubble. It wasn’t published. Yesterday, rather annoyed by one of the semi-literate columnists the paper employs these days, I sent them another letter. Again it wasn’t published.

Yet only two Septembers ago they published one of my pomposity-pricking letters, and as recently as this April one of my literary aperçus. When I was young, I thought ‘over-the-hill’ was thirty. Once I’d reached that age I thought I was safe until sixty. Having passed that milestone I naively thought that seventy was the one to watch out for. No, my friends, it’s sixty-eight. Though, as a friend of my mine much given to risqué remarks commented, my next birthday should be something to look forward to.

Anyway, for your undoubted delectation, here are the letters the Guardian sought to suppress:

6th September: One shouldn't be too hard on the Waddington café (Letters September 6th). Double espressos, like deep-based pizzas, are an American invention, unknown in Italy. The proprietor was simply checking whether his customer wanted an Anglo-Saxon beverage - a double 'expresso' - or an Italian one, an espresso.

7th September: Reading Swift's account of Gulliver's last voyage might help Jon Henley (The f-word that's suddenly everywhere) to understand why 'feral' is the appropriate term to describe a hoodie looting a shop, or a banker wrecking the economy. Swift's belief that man is not a rational animal, but simply an animal that is capable of reason underpins the Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Unlike Orwell in Animal Farm Swift strips away the comforting delusion that we simply need to guard against the pigs taking over if we are to keep society safe. The real danger isn't Napoleon but the Yahoo lurking inside each one of us. When we fail to behave as moral beings - and, rightly or wrongly, morality was thought to be based on reason - then, like the Yahoos, we revert to our undomesticated state. We go feral.

On a happier note we went to see a performance of La Rondine last night at the Villa Vinci in Cupra Marittima. In Italy think stately home for villa, not Victorian terraced-house: the Italians have retained the word’s original Latin meaning. The pile, built in 1838 is the size of your average palace. But in Italy, of course, palazzi are only found in towns, and are usually blocks of flats, office buildings, or largish town houses such as the one we live in rather than palaces in the English sense. When we entered the room where the opera was to be sung I assumed it must be a concert performance as there was no stage and a grand piano occupied one corner. I was wrong: the singers were in costume and they acted as well as sang. The twist was that the recitative was condensed and spoken rather than sung. The result was a musical, so creating the work which Puccini had originally been commissioned to write rather than the opera which he actually produced!

It was well sung - I particularly liked Antonella Pelilli (Magda) who very obviously screwed herself up to hit the high notes. But hit them she did, and had a pleasantly rounded timbre free from wobble or shrillness.

The downside was the stifling heat. Apart from the last week in July the day-time temperature has been in the mid to high thirties since mid-July. Thankfully, we were casually dressed; but in a large room without air-conditioning and packed with people the thin cotton shirt and linen trousers I was wearing might as well have been a dress shirt and dinner jacket for all the help they were in keeping cool. Even so, to Pat’s infinite relief, I didn’t pass out - unlike the previous time we saw the opera four years ago at Torre del Lago.


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