Not so full of beans.

Time is a concept whose outward and visible sign is change: without change there would be no time.  And on one level we twenty-first century folk are very conscious of its passing  with our calendars, our clocks and watches accurate to a nano-second thanks to their quartz crystals or radio signals from an atomic clock, and our New Year's Eve celebrations (or not!) and tedious media retrospectives.

   The truly important changes, though, creep by without our really being aware of them. Without a mirror, I'd probably think that my outward appearance conformed to my inner image which hasn't been updated for some forty years. In my late twenties I shaved off the beard which I'd sported since leaving school and was deeply shocked by what I saw: a fresh-faced eighteen year old replaced by someone verging on thirty - the year at which I then believed senility began. The subtle signs of ageing had been hidden by the face fungus; I started regrowing my beard the following day. And even without the benefit of a beard our families and friends seem to be unchanging - when we see someone frequently the slight physical difference from the last time we saw them is undetectable.  Furthermore, our obliviousness of time extends to those we once knew well though many years have passed since the last time we  saw them: once the initial shock has worn off, the rupture in the space time-continuum repairs itself and the outward change no longer foregrounds itself.  Which brings me on to beans.

  When I was a schoolboy I was literally full of beans. Three times a week the school authorities allowed us to have our own food  cooked in the school kitchens - provided it was an egg or came in a tin. You sent your tin or egg, with the initial of your House and your boarder's number written on it, down to the kitchens where it would be boiled and then sent up by dumb-waiter to Hall at tea-time. I  sent beans. Beans in tomato sauce, curried beans, beans with sausages or, most often, the 'Family-Size' tin - but always beans, my passion  for them was boundless. 

   Strangely, baked beans do not form part of the Italians' diet although you can buy Heinz beans, at enormous expense, hidden away in the ethnic section of hypermarkets. Fortunately, they're also obtainable at a more affordable price from the Lidl stores on the coast which have sprung up to cater for the needs of the financially-challenged. A week before Christmas we went to the shopping mall in Civitanova Marche to buy Sophy's Christmas present and when we were coming out Pat asked me if I wanted to go on to Lidl's to stock up with beans. To my own astonishment I declined, and as I did so I realised Time was doing its stuff: my taste buds had changed. Since moving here I have gradually lost my liking for filter coffee - I now find it unpleasantly insipid. For the first few years I cooked a roast dinner every Sunday: now it's a rare event whose resulting  mix of heterogeneous ingredients heaped on the same plate seems vaguely odd. I still look forward to fish and chips when I visit the UK, but almost invariably find they disappoint. English ex-pats rave about cheddar cheese and bemoan its unavailability here. I no longer know why - a decent cheddar is worth eating, but the stuff sold by the recently opened English Shop in Servigliano struck me as unpleasantly cloying with the texture of savoury fudge.

  So just as I have become gradually harder and harder of hearing, but only recently become aware of it, in a similar way my tastebuds have surreptitiously become Italianised by some mysterious process of osmosis. If only the same process operated with what came out of my mouth as opposed to what went in it, I'd be a happy man.