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