The Year of the Horse: 2013 Review.

For 1.354 billion Chinese people the Year of the Horse begins at the end of next month; it started for us on the 21st March when Pat's horse, Daisy, finally arrived at the livery stables near Amandola. Pat's passion for riding had been rekindled by the magnificent holiday in Ireland Sophy treated her to last year, and it wasn't long before she wanted to own a horse again. After a sticky start to the year when she fell and broke her shoulder, we eventually settled on the beautiful Andalusian pictured above.
  March was also memorable for our visit to Sophy and Adam in Dubai where her proud parents witnessed their elder daughter gain a place on the podium in the Spinney's Cup.

Early in June my life entered extra time - an event celebrated with family and friends at a garden party at Candy's house in Upwell. James came over from Australia and Matthew and his wife Charlie supplied us with a mini marquee. Sophy supplied the drinks but, alas, was prevented from leaving Dubai by an Emirati jobsworth.

The psalm which famously tells us that 'The days of our years are threescore and ten" continues "and if by reason of our strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow". The severe bout of sciatica I suffered in the early part of the year suggests  the psalmist's likely to be proved right. The pain went after a few months but I'm left with a permanent limp.

   In July Dave came over to Italy to accompany me to the Leonard Cohen concert in Rome for which Matthew and James had very generously bought me tickets.

   In October I had a trip to the mountains of Abruzzo with Peppe and Angiola 

which took in the earthquake devastated city of L'Aquila:

   As usual, Pat made several visits to the UK to look after Quinn while Candy was away on business. I went over in November to attend Dave's belated celebration of his seventieth:

to look after Quinn and to attend the OEs' Bristol dinner with Mike Jefferies and Chris Vincent. In this photo my old form-mate Chris "Umpter" Northover (centre) as outgoing President hands over his chain of office to another of my friends and contemporaries, Geoff "Dwarf" Beynon, (left) while the Lord Mayor looks on:

The day after the dinner, Mike, his wife Pam, Chris and I  had an enjoyable excursion to the Wye Valley.

We had a hot summer and temperatures  remained in the twenties until virtually the end of October. November, however, saw a precipitous drop in temperature with heavy snow at the end of the month - and I'm not talking about the couple of centimetres which brings the UK to its knees.

Let's hope the weather's better in 2015 as from that year ex-pat pensioners will no longer be eligible for the winter fuel allowance.

  November's snow was followed by torrential rain early this month which not only removed the snow but huge chunks from a large number of roads as well, including the one below Montefalcone's town walls.

We are expecting a particularly enjoyable family Christmas this year as both Sophy and Adam and Candy and Quinn will be joining us in the flesh, whilst we hope to FaceTime - Apple's version of Skype - Matthew and Charlie and James, Gabriel, Ruby and Olly.

Tenth Anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of our move to that magical place beyond the clouds - Montefalcone Appennino.

"The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water

sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The Wood,

whose every tree-foot's cloven in the black glad sight of

the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary

Ann Sailors who knows there is Heaven on earth and the

chosen people of His kind fire in Llaregyb's land, that is

the fairday farmhands' wantoning ignorant chapel of

bridesbeds, and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved

sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly wind-shaken

wood springs awake for the second dark time this one

Spring day."

The Courtyard Circular: October and November 2013.

October.

After a wet and relatively cold spell at the beginning of the month the weather improved  and remained good until October was almost over -  22º at San Lorenzo on the 28th - before rain arrived on the 29th and the temperature dropped to the mid-teens.

  Pat was in England from the 6th to the 12th but Tony and Shona arrived for the Sagra on the 7th, Jane on the 5th and John and Judi on the 11th. I had lunch at Peppe and Angiola's together with Tony and Shona on the 10th and Pat and I had supper with the Cairns at the Taverna on the 17th.

 On the 20th Peppe and Angiola took me to visit Calascio a village in the Monti della Laga in Abruzzo:

 

We then went on to L'Aquila which despite Berlusconi's promise to rebuild the city quickly still looks like a modern version of Pompei over four years after the earthquake which killed 297 people in the city and its hinterland.

Click here to see other photos of the trip.

October's other positive event was finding Meg safe and well after she had disappeared overnight on the 23rd.

Now for the bad news! 

November.

Things have continued to fall apart. Although I got the computer back with a new graphics card last month the coffee machine decided to pack up at the beginning of November, just before I went to the UK for Dave's seventieth, and to look after Quinn and attend the OEs' Bristol dinner. We took it to Porto d'Ascoli to be repaired when I got back, picked it up last Saturday and found that the problem was still there so I've taken it back today.

   Snow arrived on the 25th, and on the 26th I woke to find it had snowed very heavily overnight. 

It began thawing on the 28th.

  Although my computer was repaired gratis, it ended up costing me 80 euros as I managed to be caught twice by speed cameras: the first time going to Ascoli to take the computer to be repaired and the second when I went to pick it up.

  

The Sprawl of the House of Escher.

Montefalcone is perched on a cliff two and a half thousand feet above sea level. For a Westcountryman, who'd been exiled to the East Anglian fens for over thirty years, that is one of its many attractions. Except in winter. Once the snow has been ploughed the residual layer is soon compacted by the incessant motorised traffic - like the English, the Italians will never walk anywhere if they can drive, no matter how narrow the street - into treacherous ice, making walking round the village a hazardous enterprise. In winter my thrice daily walk with the dogs - we have no garden, and dog faeces wouldn't add to the attractiveness of our 16th century courtyard - changes from an idyll to a nightmare. Two dogs pulling on their leads while you climb up an ice covered street isn't much fun. Going down the slope, though, is even worse, and unfortunately if you go up a hill during your walk logic dictates you must inevitably walk down one to return to your starting point. 

  For many years we were perplexed, and impoverished, by Enel - the Italian electricity company - charging us the higher rate applicable to non-residents. Then one day we noticed that the bill related to 34 Via Roma but was invoiced to 18 Via San Pietro. It took several years to convince Enel that the two addresses related to the same property. For our house sprawls over a slope: the front door and cantinas are accessed from Via Roma whereas if you enter the house from Via San Pietro you find yourself on the floor above. 

   And this has proved a blessing when going shopping in winter. As you can see from the map I can climb up the hill where the village shop is located and return home with my purchases without ever having to go back down it.  

So in this case Escher triumphs over logic; if only it were always so.

UCAS

Unlike my trip to the UK in November 2012, last week's visit passed off without any major disasters. True, I managed to leave my hat behind in the Lamb and Flag, Welney,  the Tuesday before last when I went there with Richard Dalton, and the previous Sunday I'd left the parmesan I'd brought over for Sam Jefferies in Dave's fridge in Leicester. But Candy drove me to Welney on our way back from Quinn's swimming lesson in Downham to retrieve the hat, and Dave very kindly posted the cheese to Sam in Bristol. It arrived there before I did. And, above all, when I flew back to Italy this Monday - despite only having forty minutes to do so - I managed to get from the plane to the coach for Pedaso, so avoiding having to spend the night in Fiumicino.
   The beginning of the trip, though, was a little more stressful thanks to UCAS. To explain. When I was at work  I had quite a lot of involvement with UCAS, helping our FE students to compile their HE applications and, as Course Director, dealing with applications to our BA Humanities programme. Apart from the slight absurdity of receiving UCAS forms from my own FE students I had no problems with UCAS. It was certainly an improvement on the system obtaining when I was applying to university in the early sixties: you had to fill in a separate form for every university you hoped might offer you a place. In a word, UCAS simplified things.
  In July I read an amusing article by Beppe Severgnini in the Corriere della Sera in which he referred to UCAS. Only here the initials stood for the legendary Ufficio Complicazioni Affari Semplici [The office for complicating straightforward transactions] which  Severgnini dubbed one of Italy's longest lived institutions. It was one which I had had plenty of dealings with in Italy; to my surprise, I was to discover it had extended its tentacles across the Channel.
   When Dave came over to Rome in the summer for the Cohen concert I booked us train tickets from Rome to Ancona online from Trenitalia, Italy's publicly owned railway company. It was a simple matter: you made the booking and the tickets were emailed to you. Before I came to England in November I booked a National Express coach ticket from Wisbech to Bristol online from the company's website. Like the Trenitalia tickets they were emailed to me. Unfortunately the British railway companies have outsourced their online booking to Italy's UCAS. Rather than simply emailing you the tickets they send you a code which has to be punched into a machine on the station platform, having first inserted the debit card with which you bought the tickets. Envisaging problems I didn't book the first train to leave Stansted after my plane was due to land. The tickets are non-transferable and had the plane landed late I could well have missed the train. So with over an hour in hand to collect the tickets I thought I had UCAS licked. It was only when the ticket inspector asked to  see my ticket that I discovered I'd nearly lost. The machine on the platform had spewed out three cards, and as only one of them was the ticket I'd paid scant attention to the other two. When I handed the inspector my ticket he asked me for my receipt - "The ticket's not valid without it," he added. So that was what one of the other cards was. God knows what I'd done with it, I didn't think it had any importance. Fortunately he added that it would be valid if I could show him the email confirming the purchase which I was able to.
  Thereafter, the trip went smoothly. Dave's daughter, Kate, picked me up from Leicester station, and his cousin John took me to Dave's seventieth party. It was also a mini Keele reunion, with Arthur McCutcheon and Mike Farmer as well as Dave and myself (see the photo heading this post). The following day Dave, Arthur and I FaceTimed another Keele contemporary, Joe Pownall, whom Sue - in a piece of investigative work worthy of Miss Marple - had managed to track down. Dave and I hadn't been in touch with him since the late seventies.
  After six days staying at Candy's I went to the Old Elizabethans' dinner in Bristol

 

on the 9th, staying with Sam and Pam Jefferies. Chris Vincent was also staying with Sam:

The following day the four of us went to the Wye Valley in the afternoon

 

and in the evening Mike Farmer popped in on his way home from a party in Chippenham.

  And on Monday I returned home to a Le Marche swept by tempests which had killed two people in the north of the Region.

Miracle at Montefalcone

On Wednesday the 23rd, just after five, I took the dogs to the upper woods (to the left on the map, to the right in the photo) for their usual late afternoon walk. When we reached Valentino and Cecilia's house 1, one of their adopted strays, Fred, joined us. When it was time to put them on the lead to return home Meg and Fred had disappeared, a not uncommon event. I spent ten fruitless minutes calling her. Then Pat arrived. Fred reappeared but as there was still no sign of Meg we retraced our route through the woods constantly calling her, to no avail although I could hear a dog which sounded like her barking below me in the  far distance. By now it was dark.       

   Pat took Eva home and then drove round the roads (see red arrows below) which encircle the upper woods and, on the eastern side divide them from the lower woods, 

looking for Meg. I stayed at the point 2 from which I could hear barking, continually calling her.  Then, when Pat phoned to say there was no sign of Meg on the roads,  I used the iPhone's torch, to help me slowly navigate my way out of the upper woods to Fred's 1 where Pat was waiting in the car. We drove to where 3 we could once again hear the barking, which we now discovered was coming from the lower woods (to the right on the map, to the left in the photo) . Carrying the torch Pat had brought from home, I attempted to go towards the sound down a steep and muddy path 4. Unfortunately, it led me away from the barking so we gave up and got home almost four hours after the walk began. Pat was convinced we'd never see Meg again. 

  At seven the next morning Pat took Eva to the upper woods to look for Meg while I walked to where we'd heard the barking from the lower woods, crossing myself as I passed a shrine to Our Lady 5 en route. There was no longer any barking but I thought that if I could get to below where we'd previously heard it I might be able to climb up through the woods to find her. I set off down a track by the cemetery 6, well to the south east of the previous evening's barking. When I got to the bottom and turned a corner there she was - Meg, alive and well - trapped inside a chain-link fence surrounding a plantation of oak trees 7, and nowhere near where I'd had a very faint hope she might be.  If I hadn't found her she would almost certainly have starved to death. The gate was padlocked but I managed to pull up enough of the bottom of a section of fencing to get her out. In a way it was fortunate that she'd been trapped because, given her predilection for trying to round up cars as if they were sheep, she'd have probably have been run over if she'd tried to make her way home in the dark.

 Was her salvation a fortunate concatenation of circumstances or divine intervention? Take your pick.

Update to May 4th's Post.

The BBC have recently screened the Italian TV dramatisation of The Young Montalbano complete with English subtitles. Episode 3, Back to Basics, incorporates the plot of Pezzetti di spago assolutamente inutilizzabili.

The Courtyard Circular: August and September 2013

August.

August, as usual, saw  our social life take a severe downturn as term ended for the dayboys: the Rogers went home on the 5th and the Cairns on the  9th. We had Sunday lunch at the Trattoria di Moro with Tony and Shona before they left, and coffee at John and Judy's a couple of days before their departure. On the 13th went with Glyn to a concert of Celtic music, La Cuma di Notte at the Monte Rinaldo archeological site. It wasn't very good and - even worse - while I was filming a song the screen on my camera packed up.

The following day we had a pleasant birthday lunch with Glyn at Il Faro on Pedaso beach, followed by heavy rain. Ferragosto began as though it were an English bank holiday,  grey and much cooler. However it picked up in the afternoon with blue skies and temperature in the mid-twenties. Although it never returned to the low thirties of  early August, the weather remained good on the whole until the last Sunday in September when I had to finally abandon shorts.

September: Things - and people - fall apart.

The month began fairly well. On Sunday 1st Pat had an enjoyable hack out on Daisy and in the late afternoon we went to a Chopin concert given by Gil Jetley at his house.



On the 6th we got the second load of wood in before Pat went to the UK until the 13th
the following day.

 On the 8th I went to Joey Luis's confirmation in Force,

returning home to stack the wood to make room for the third and final load on the 11th.
   Then things carried on from last month's camera disaster as more things started to fall apart. Firstly, while Pat was away the boiler decided to pack up so I was without hot water until the 15th when Pompeo and Peppe effected a temporary fix. It went off again on the 18th and we're still awaiting some replacement parts. Secondly, warning lights came on in the car, one of which began flashing menancingly. Thirdly, installing an iTunes update on the 18th in order to download iOS 7 led to a distorted graphical display followed by flickering and crashing. Eventually the computer became unusable. Fortunately, searching the web revealed that the mid-2011 model of my computer came with a faulty graphics card and Apple would replace it gratis. Took the computer to Ascoli last Tuesday and will pick it up tomorrow.
  And it's not just things which are breaking. On the 22nd I got my foot caught in a shop-fitting at Lupo's alimentari and went sprawling, the corner of another fitting hitting me in the mid-riff. The same day at mass Don Marco fainted and fell backwards hitting his head on the altar steps. He was taken to Fermo Hospital but, fortunately, was back at his post this Sunday. As has my sciatica since the last week of September!

Welcome to Bongo Bongo Land

The Ukip MEP, Godfrey Bloom, has caused a stir by suggesting the aid given by Britain to African countries would be better spent at home, particularly when the UK is still in recession. And, he added, much of the aid is squandered:  “How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month, when we’re in this sort of debt, to bongo bongo land is completely beyond me, to buy Ray-Ban sunglasses, apartments in Paris, Ferraris and all the rest of it that goes with most of the foreign aid.”

   He is of course absolutely correct in every respect bar one: the location of Bongo Bongo Land. For this mythical land is not confined to Africa, but has spread its empire to every country, in every continent of the globe, including his own. I've commented before on how the British taxpayer is aiding Goodwin and his ilk to enjoy a gilded life-style. Yesterday's Corriere della Sera carried an article which revealed how Italy, or Bunga Bunga Land, is outstripping the English province of Bongo Bongo Land. To cite just one example: Mauro Sentinelli, the former MD of Telecom Italia receives a pension of €91,337 a month, paid for by - you've guessed it - the Italian taxpayer. Almost makes you feel sorry for poor old Fred struggling to get by on a mere £342,500 per annum.
  The paper also carried an article by Guido Rossi, Il mercato che uccide la democrazia è il nuovo Leviatano degli egoisti [The Market which is destroying democracy is the new Leviathan of the self-centred]. The Market, he suggests, is the 'regno dell'arrangiarsi e del diritto del più forte' [the kingdom of everyone having to shift for himself where might is right]. Or as, Godfrey Bloom would never put it, the true kingdom of Bongo Bongo Land.

The Courtyard Circular: July 2013

The month has largely revolved around music and eating.


Music.
As well as the Cohen concert in Rome near the beginning of the month, last Sunday saw some musical entertainment closer to home. The Pro Loco had arranged an event in the Tronelli Gardens to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the village's murals. Two of the artists who had painted them when they were art students gave an account of their time in the village and a professor of art restoration spoke about what would be involved if the village wished to restore the murals.

There was also an exhibition of photographs of the murals taken when they were newly painted. All of which was accompanied by live music from the Montenegro Balkan and Klezmer Band. Pat and I had naively assumed they hailed from the other side of the Adriatic. Peppe put us right: they came from the nearby village of Montemonaco! Nevertheless, they made a jolly sound, rather reminiscent of Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band:

Food.

On the first Friday of the month we had a caribbean curry at Tony and Shona's. Shona's sister, Rosemary, was staying with them and had anticipated my fall at Fiumicino with an earlier one of her own at Stansted. The following day Pat and I had our anniversary lunch, a day early, at the Faro on Pedaso seafront before we went our separate ways the following day: she to Upwell, I to Rome. The evening of our return from Rome on the 8th, Dave and I went to village's newly reopened locanda - renamed La Sfinge [the sphinx] - with Tony, Shona and Rosemary for a pizza. The following day Dave and I went to Il Tiglio, at Isola San Biagio, for lunch. Dave went back to the UK on the 12th and on the following Saturday I was invited to lunch by Peppe and Angiola. Jane was a fellow guest.

  Pat's return from the UK on the 13th was followed by an epicurean frenzy: on the 16th we dined with Glyn and his friend Paul at the Agriturismo Montorso, on the 17th we took Peppe Alessandroni and his son, Joe, to lunch at the Osteria del Lago San Ruffino. Two days later we were Peppe A's guests at his daughter, Rosita's, pizzeria in Force. The week was rounded off on Saturday when we went to La Sfinge with Tony and Shona, John and Judi, and Jane. 

  And, to round off the month's sociable guzzling, Tony and Shona came round to supper yesterday evening.

Kate and Wills outed

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have just been outed as Archers' fans. The Mail, Sun, and Express have each exclusively revealed the royal couple's secret.
 William and Kate have decided to name their first-born after two Archer's characters: the self-righteous William Grundy's eldest brat, George, and the late Nigel Pargetter's stepfather, Lewis - one assume's the child's parents will pronounce Louis in the traditional English and current American fashion, rather than attempting the foreign pronunciation favoured by those sad souls who insist on saying Key-oh-tay rather than Quixote, hunta rather than junta, and who mistakenly believe that Byron wrote a poem called Don Wan.
 He is also named after Christopher Robin's pet beetle.

Fifty Shades of Meaning.

I've had a problem with the last two books I've read: in the first case the fault lay with me, in the second with the text itself.
 Last month Angiola lent me Una bella estate, a collection of three novellas by the neo-realist Cesare Pavese, which was first published in 1949, the year before his suicide. In the Thirties Pavese had translated A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Italian and in some ways Una bella estate reminds me of Dubliners, with Turin and its hinterland replacing the Irish capital. Like Joyce's short stories, Pavese's novellas depict protagonists suffering from varying shades of loneliness. And here lay the problem. My normal approach to reading French or Italian fiction is to plough on regardless of whether I've understood every word. Usually when an unfamiliar word has reappeared a couple of times the contexts will have established the meaning. And if they don't, as long as I've got the general drift it doesn't matter. But with Pavese this approach didn't function: as with Dubliners, his stories' meanings were revealed through subtle variations of tone rather than through plot. So despite taking several weeks to read 300 odd pages, I can't claim to have fully appreciated the work. Or, more accurately, to adopt the perspective of the Reader-Response critics, the text which I created was vastly inferior to those created by a native speaker. Nevertheless I enjoyed the stories, particularly the second and the third: Il diavolo nelle colline and Tra donne sole. In the latter Pavese employs a female narrator, Clelia, the only male author I can recall doing so apart from Defoe. No doubt there are countless others, some of whom I may have read, but my memory is rather shaky these days. Clelia was an interesting, if sad case. Like Catherine Earnshaw, and Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in The Fall, she saw no connection between sex and love. For Clelia, like Stella, the former was simply a pleasurable activity, like eating in a good restaurant. For Cathy it was simply something to pacify her husband when he'd been upset by the emotional intensity of her reunion with Heathcliff.
  Unlike Una bella estate, my next book, Camilleri's latest detective story, Un covo di vipere, only took a couple of days to read. As always with his Montalbano tales, it was strongly plotted and there were no great subtleties of tone. Unfortunately there was no great subtlety of plot either: I'd guessed the identity of the assassin very early on. 'Guessed' is probably the wrong word: her identity was blindingly obvious. As the novel progressed succeeding events only served to strengthen my original hypothesis. I kept on hoping that I was wrong: surely making a character seem so obviously guilty must be a red-herring? It wasn't, and Camilleri's disappointing form continues.

Show Me the Place

Pat and I spent our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary apart: she flew to the UK to spend the week with a handsome younger male* whilst I travelled to Rome to spend the night with someone else**.

    To explain. Matt and James had very generously bought me, as a birthday present,  two tickets to the Leonard Cohen concert at the Foro Italico in Rome, intending that Pat would go with me. Unfortunately she had already booked a flight to England to look after Quinn. Charlie therefore persuaded Dave to say he'd go with me, and Sue to allow him.

    During a concert lasting almost three hours Cohen sang, in addition to classics such as Bird on a Wire and Chelsea Hotel, several of his less well known songs. Show Me the Place was not amongst them; it should have been.

   I'd travelled by coach from Pedaso to Fiumicino to meet Dave, arriving about three hours before his plane was due to land. Having bought Camilleri's latest Montalbano story, Un covo di vipere [A Nest of Vipers], at a motorway service station on the journey to Rome I was looking forward to carrying on reading it in the Arrivals Hall. Unfortunately, that's when the nightmare began. There are three terminals at Fiumicino: Terminal Three for long-haul flights, Terminal One for flights from continental Europe, and Terminal Two for flights from the UK. I quickly located Terminal Two Departures, and both Arrivals and Departures for Terminals One and Three, but could see no sign of Terminal Two Arrivals - the one I needed.

  Show Me the Place, I begged a baggage handler. He gave me directions, but although I followed them I failed to locate Terminal Two Arrivals. Show Me the Place I asked another airport employee and following her directions brought me to Terminal Two Departures - of Arrivals there was no sign. As I looked desperately around the Departures Lounge for an arrow to Arrivals, I suddenly found myself flat on my face - I'd stumbled over one of the low tables airports attach to the end of a row of seats. I limped on in my Kafkaesque quest, up and down the road which runs through the airport, crossing from side to side with increasing desperation as the skies opened and it began to pour with rain. I eventually ended up back at Terminal One Arrivals and asked a security guard to  Show Me the Place where I could meet Dave's plane. Go to Terminal Three, he said, there is no Terminal Two Arrivals!

  Dave duly arrived and we took a taxi to the B & B I'd booked. Unfortunately No 33 Via G Calderoni wasn't a simple building but the gateway to a massive complex of apartment blocks, with no indication of which one housed the B & B. 

I hailed a passer-by: 'Show Me the Place', I begged, but although he lived in the complex he had no idea where the B& B was. Then I recalled that I'd got their number on my phone and, calling them, received directions.

   Having checked in, we set off on the ten minute walk to the concert venue. Crossing a bridge over the Tiber we overtook a middle-aged couple looking lost. "Do you speak English?" asked the man.

  "Are you looking for the Cohen concert?" I replied.

  "Yes, Show Me the Place," he pleaded - or words to that effect. So we did - and here it is:

*Quinn **Dave

The Courtyard Circular: June 2013

England 5th - 10th June

The main event of the month was my trip to England with Pat. We arrived at Candy's on Wednesday afternoon to be greeted by Matthew and Charlie and James who had come over to erect the marquee they had brought with them for my 'surprise' party on the 8th:

Candy, Matthew, Charlie, James and I repaired to the Five Bells afterwards.

  The following day, which was warm and sunny, James came with me to Peterborough to renew my passport. How fortunate that he did: I'd managed to leave my wallet in a phone shop in Wisbech and would have had no money to pay for it. Having ordered the passport we sped back to Wisbech, retrieved the wallet and had lunch in the courtyard of the Rose & Crown before returning to Peterborough to collect the passport.

  Friday - again warm and sunny - was my birthday, and we had a family supper at the Bank House in King's Lynn:

Pat's behind the camera.

   The party was held on Saturday, guests sheltering from the cold in the marquee beneath the wonderful plaque Matthew had constructed, referencing God's Wonderful Railway. 

As a boy, I used to  'spot' their locomotives at Temple Meads station, as an adult I bought models of their engines and rolling stock and constructed kits of its buildings. As a young man my maternal grandfather worked for the company.

   On Sunday several of the guests - including Dave and Sue, Chris and Di, and Maggie and Phil - who'd stayed in Wisbech overnight braved the cold to pop in to see us before returning home. Matthew, Charlie and James came over to dismantle the marquee and take down the lights.

  When we flew in to Ancona on Monday it was cloudy but warm - 25 degrees. However, travelling south down the A14 it became progressively colder and wetter. By the time we reached Force to pick up the dogs the temperature had dropped to 13 degrees and the rain had become a torrent.

Tempo inglese.

The weather picked up two days later and we enjoyed twelve days of sunshine with temperatures in the thirties, apart from a freak storm which shattered our window over the stairs.

 Unfortunately, the good weather didn't last and most of last week has been far colder - upper teens and low twenties - with lots of rain, not at all in keeping with the English stereotype of southern Europe. I blame the arrival of the dayboys: Tony and Shona and John and Judi.

And:

We had pizzas with Tony and Shona at Le Fate in Smerillo on the 1st and Jane came to supper the following day. We went to Le Fate again with Jane and her guest John on the 14th and dined at a taverna in Foce on the 19th with Peppe and Angiola. Norman and Jayne have invited us to supper this evening.

  

The Queen of Diamonds

The UK is still suffering from the economic crisis triggered by the greed and criminal ineptitude of American bankers and their European acolytes. It's only reasonable that all its citizens, apart from the most vulnerable, should bear their part of the consequent economic pain.  And that includes pensioners. I would have no objection to Osborne withdrawing the winter fuel allowance from those of us whose annual family income is above the national median. What sticks in the craw is his cynical exploitation of the ignorance of the average voter. Believing the continent to be bathed in perpetual sunshine, 365 days a year, most of the electorate regard withdrawing the fuel allowance  for  pensioners  living abroad  as long overdue. Sky News interviewed a councillor from Teignmouth who claimed that his elderly parents living in Madrid had told him they didn't need the allowance because "It's always warm here."  Maybe they are suffering from senile dementia: every independent weather channel I've been able to find states that in winter Madrid's temperature hits freezing, frequently becoming cold enough to support snowfall. 
  Even worse, The Daily Mash and NewsThump  two purportedly satirical websites, posted articles not only supporting Osborne's position but, in the case of The Daily Mash, seeing it as a self-evident truth. 
  NewsThump sells tee-shirts emblazoned with the legend "I think, therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader", thus unwittingly demonstrating that, although satire may be dead, inadvertent self-satire is not.
  I sent a letter to the Guardian:

I am a retired English lecturer living two and a half thousand feet above sea level in central Italy. Every winter we experience prolonged and heavy snow-falls. Electricity in Italy costs roughly twice as much as it does in the UK where I spent all of my working life. I pay UK tax on my modest pension. 

Although I will lose my winter fuel allowance in 2015, I draw comfort from the fact that once he's sixty, if he's living in the UK, Fred Goodwin will be able to claim the benefit, supplementing the £342,500 a year pension my taxes help to pay for.

It wasn't published.

   All of which shows Osborne's political nous. He could have saved money by removing the allowance from pensioners whose income was above a certain level. But that would have lent credence to the dangerous idea that the economic cuts should impinge on an individual in proportion to his means. That there was something unjust about the average joe having his modest salary frozen while the median total remuneration of FTSE 100 bosses rose by 8 per cent to £3.7 million. Instead the Chancellor played his Queen of Diamonds: the 'Europe' word. Instantly tens of millions of seemingly normal British citizens were turned into Manchurian Candidates, deprived of rational thought as, frothing at the mouth, they denounced the ex-pats sheltering in the bosom of the Anti-Christ's eurozone. 
  "Good boy, George. Job done," said the global financier, patting Osborne on the shoulder, before climbing aboard his limousine and disappearing into the distant shadows.

Jim's Apotheosis

In common with the other species of animals with whom we share this planet, human beings exist in time. Our bodies today differ from the ones we inhabited ten years ago, which again differ from those of each of the preceding decades we've been alive. And the 'we' inhabiting them changes even more rapidly. Not only do we add to our store of knowledge over the years, we modify the way we perceive external reality. When I was a small child my father told me that the world was round - he should of course have said spherical. Children are logical beings and I took him at his word, picturing the world as being like a dinner plate. In the summer we used to drive from Portishead to Weston-super-Mare at the weekends and stroll along the promenade. I imagined that all of Somerset's lanes and roads, like the ones we drove along, eventually ended up on the promenade which I envisaged encircling the world like the raised rim of a dinner plate. Finally, our emotions are in a continual state of flux, so giving the coup de grâce to our having a constant identity.

  The Deity, according to the theologians, is different, existing in an eternal present outside space and time. Thus in the Catholic take on the concept, because he is God as well as man, Christ's earthly actions also exist in an eternal present. His blessing bread and wine at the Last Supper and his crucifixion exist contemporaneously and eternally, and when a priest says mass he is connecting to those two events and transubstantiating the bread and wine into the flesh and blood hanging on the cross.

  And last Saturday at my seventieth birthday party I moved towards that godlike state of existing in an eternal present as all the stages of my life from the age of eleven were really, and substantially, and simultaneously present.

First there was Chris Vincent (pictured above), accompanied by his wife Di. I'd been at school with Chris for seven years from 1954 to 1961 - arguably the bleakest years of my life and only made tolerable by my close friends: Chris, his twin Roger, Mike Jefferies, and John Osborne. Roger and John, alas, never made their three score years and ten.

Then there was Dave, accompanied by Sue, who I first met when we were eighteen year old undergraduates at Keele - in stark contrast to school four of the happiest years of my life.

I moved to Norfolk in 1971 and first met Jeff (pictured above), who came to the party with his wife Helen and daughter Molly, when I was living in Hunstanton.

Having originally intended to stay there for three years I ended up working at the Tech in Lynn from 1971 to 2003. As the working environment deteriorated with the advent of Thatcherism, my friends Ed, Frank, John and Chris Bell (pictured above) helped keep me relatively sane. Ed, Frank and John were accompanied by their wives: Uschi, Daphne and Viv. Chris came with Glenda, his former partner, my former student and Candy's former teacher!

In 1975 I moved to the Fens' living successively in Middle Drove, Elm and Upwell. Richard with his fiancée Jane, John and Joy Simpson and Milshen (all pictured above) are friends we made then.

Finally, in 2003 we moved to Italy and soon made friends with Tony and Shona, pictured above, and Maggie and Phil, pictured earlier on with Chris Bell.

 Whatever our view of the prospect of an after-life peddled by the various religions - getting pissed on mead in Valhalla, getting laid at a bunga-bunga party in the Moslem version, or standing around in a nightie playing the harp in the distinctly tedious Christian heaven - we can all agree that our children and grandchildren confer a kind of immortality. Three of my five children and one of my four grandchildren were physically present at the party:

The Richards boys (minus Josh and Olly)

Candy, the hostess

Sophy

My elder daughter, Sophy, got as far as Dubai airport where some Emirati jobsworth prevented her leaving the country. However, she was still the life and soul of the party: she had very generously paid for all the wine we consumed. So although - thank heaven -she wasn't really and substantially present in the wine like God in the mass, she was symbolically present, like Christ in a Protestant communion service.

  And the party's other midwives were of course:

Pat

Pat's sister, Deborah

Matt's wife, Charlie

All of the seasons, covering the last fifty-nine years of my life are brought together in this glorious film of my apotheosis:

The photos of the party which don't appear in this post can be found here:

http://www.jamesrichards.eu/The_Pool_of_Narcissus/Seventieth.html