Italietta mia

Trawling the English press for news of home I’m rewarded by two choice glimpses into contemporary Italian sexual mores. The first is news of the arrest of two men for having kissed (termed by the carabinieri an ‘oral relationship’) outside the Coliseum. This has prompted gay groups to organise a kiss-in and arch-homophobe Rocco Buttiglione, the man the EU sent home, to say that the kiss was part of a crusade to undermine traditional values. (It takes so little…).

The second involves the wonderfully named Cosimo Mele, an MP and member of Buttiglione’s own party, who got anxious when the tart he was entertaining in a hotel room, presumably because his wife had guests, came over all funny after a substantial amount of cocaine. He called the police, distracting them, no doubt, from their kiss-watching duties at Rome’s most historic buildings, and found his name in the following day’s newspapers. He’s resigned from the party, though not apparently from parliament, but nonetheless managed to pat himself on the back for having phoned for help. The idea that he might just have done a bunk was clearly there as an option.

It’s fairly obvious what these two stories tell us about Italy. It’s sad, though, that of all the news generated by the sixth economic power, NATO member, etc. etc. these should have been the only items considered worth printing by the Guardian. There’s nothing, for example, about Cesare Previti resigning from the senate. Previti, Berlusconi’s henchman and erstwhile business lawyer, not to speak of ex-Minister of Justice, and one of the most unredeemably sordid members of the buffoon’s inner circle, was recently condemned definitively for corrupting a judge on his boss’s behalf. He has finally given up his seat weeks before being booted out and can now devote his forensic energies to commuting his six year sentence to house arrest overlooking the fountains of Piazza Farnese.

This clearly wasn’t seen as deserving of the ink.

First stop: Ireland

Dublin airport comes as a shock: in a world that’s gone haywire with security measures while fast-tracking anything in a burka—male or female, in YSL knickers or gelignite corsets—an entirely pleasant one. We’re bussed to what would normally be the hermetic world of Arrivals and find ourselves shouldering our way through departing holidaymakers en route to Malaga or Warsaw; we wander through the endless retail opportunities of modern travel, mingling and mixing in the most promiscuous manner with Departures before we even hit customs, let alone passport control. It’s a refreshingly relaxed—I hesitate to say Irish—solution (surrender?) to the awfulness of air travel, even though AerLingus is doing its best to behave like its arch rival and would-be purchaser Ryanair. Examples? Payment for items of baggage (half-price online!). In-flight panini (one panini; two paninis? povero italiano mio) at €5 a shot, tea at €2. At least Giuseppe and I get to sit together without having to pay priority or queue for an hour and a half at the gate. (Relax, McLeary. If that’s your name. Sooner or later, it will all be yours. And then we die.)

We’re going to Ireland to celebrate the wedding of two dear friends of ours, Bridie and Dominic. Dominic is Maika’s brother and English, though of Irish stock, but Bridie, as her name suggests, is a genuine Irish beauty, born and bred. We’re touched and honoured to be invited, and only slightly phased by the difficulty of getting from the airport to the splendid hotel we’re booked into for the weekend. (A little product placement here. The Finnstown Country House Hotel. I have only good things to say about it, apart from the price of mineral water, but that’s a generic issue with the modern world. Fine food, fine beds and sofas and internet connections and gardens, fine freebies in the bathroom, constant hot water, by all accounts a fine Turkish bath and swimming pool, peacocks to die for, a dog we didn’t have the luck to meet. I recommend it.)

Fortunately, Maika’s sister, Samantha, and her sons, Alex and Mallory, have agreed to find room for us in their hired car and, with great generosity (theirs) and immense discomfort (Mallory’s and mine), we arrive, five people and five substantial suitcases, crammed into an Opel Corsa, with minimal disagreement as to what exactly constitutes a roundabout in the ongoing road works of the M40. If you’ve been there you’ll know what I mean. I was last in Ireland in 1976. Believe me, things were different. I saw the first beggar of my life outside Bewley’s. (This was before Thatcher modernised the UK and introduced beggary as a career option.) Now there’s a sprawl of expensive suburban housing everywhere we look.

The church is hexagonal and modern, like a theatre in the round, flanked by an old and sombre tower with a faintly Tolkienesque air to it. Father Sean, the priest, came with us on the bus. He wins me over when Bridie’s entrance is greeted by scattered, inappropriate applause and he says: ‘She’s looking absolutely beautiful. Let’s all give her a clap.’ (Or words to that effect.) The service is long but varied, with contributions from Maika and all the younger family members and a sermon from Father Sean, both authoritative and modest, that comes down to the need to be kind. Be kind, he says, be kind. I’m torn between my disdain for organised religion and a fondness for both the man and his message, which is so ecumenical it includes us all, worshippers and atheists alike. He wins me over once again when his grace at the reception begins with the words: “We are so hungry, Lord”. Because we are.

And our hunger (and thirst) is amply and skilfully met by chicken and seafood roulades and mouth-melting beef. There’s a provocative gender distinction to round off an excellent meal, when the women are provided with pavlova and the men sticky toffee pudding. This causes consternation at my role-challenged table, with Giuseppe demanding pavlova and Maika and Sally sticky toffee pudding. And then we dance, and drink, and dance, and are treated to an exhilarating taste of Irish dancing from Bridie’s cousin, and dance and drink again and somehow find room for sandwiches and deep-fried mushrooms and coffee at some late point in the evening. Giuseppe requests I Will Survive and his request, to our delight, is met. I rediscover the joy of Guinness, on several occasions, and talk to Daniel at length about ducks and overall have a wonderful time. And then the evening begins to blur.

Most of the photographs I took are circumstantial, but I’m fond of this one, taken as the newlyweds cross the lawn towards the official photographer, safe and dry beneath a tree. It has a sense of both departure and arrival, a little like Dublin airport, but there’s nothing at any airport in the world as caring as the way Dominic holds the umbrella over Bridie’s head or as elegant as the way she has gathered her dress in her hand to keep it off the drive.

Not waving, but drowning using Tyla’s connection…

I’m trapped in a broadband challenged hell. It’s so easy to invoke Kafka when a couple of things go wrong, so I won’t (Oh, I have…) but I’ve spent the past two weeks battling with phone problems: no landline, no ADSL, no patience, if you want to hear of our new offers press 3, if you want to murder a person in a call centre press 6, etc. There’s no end to this in sight (i.e. I’ve been promised ‘tomorrow’ on five consecutive occasions, and I’ll be going on holiday quite soon and may not get a chance to resume normal service before I do. But please don’t abandon me! I promise I’ll be back in a week or so. And in the meantime I might surprise you…

Caring a fig

I wonder why we use the expression ‘I don’t care a fig’ to express a lack of interest in something. The fig is one of the most extraordinary fruits around. It’s nutritious, beautiful to look at whether green and plump or glistening and black, exquisite fresh or dried, thirst-quenching, luxurious. Sexy. Slightly alien with its sugary tendrils clustered inside the skin. Just look at this one, fresh and bursting open on Daniela’s table in Norma.

Taking the good with the bad

I’ve had a particularly trying few days, most of the problems being related to technology and its failings: no land line, no broadband, a mysterious corrupt file message as two days’ work is erased before my eyes and proves irretrievable. (No, don’t tell me how to find it, because I’ve done the damn thing again, and knowing that all my effort was needless would break my heart – or balls, as we say in Italy.)

So it’s good to get some heart-warming news from the British courts. Lydia Playfoot, the girl for whom saying ‘No’ just isn’t in-your-face enough, has seen her case dismissed against the school that refused to let her wear her ‘purity ring’ (replacements obtainable for only £13 from It’s a Silver Ring Thing, the business religious organisation run by her mum and dad and ex-lingerie model and Jacko fan, Denise Pfeiffer – more about the lovely Denise here). Even better, her father’s been ordered to pay £12,000 in costs to the school. Expect an increase in the price of beanie hats, etc., to cover this. You can read all about it here.

Suddenly, everything seems rosy again.

Fat cat

I was looking down into the garden this afternoon when one of our three cats decided to relax. His name’s Rocco, otherwise known as Tubs, Porco, Samsonite and the GFGO (the Great Fat Grey One). You can admire him here. And before you report me to any animal welfare organisations, maybe you can tell me how to put one cat on a diet and not the other two, both svelte and rangy by comparison, without separating them. Dogs are easy; they eat to order. Cats, as we know, are picky and approach eating much as Greeks seem to do, in a leisurely intermittent fashion, as though they had all the time in the world. As, indeed, they do. (Cats, that is.)

I’ll have mine without the polonium 210, please

I’ve been looking to see where visitors to this blog actually come from and how they get here, in that obsessive way most bloggers seem to share, and I notice that a disturbing number find me through a Google image search for Putin and Dobby. Some months ago I posted a sequence of images in which the Russian thug morphs into Harry Potter’s nasty little antagonist and now it’s the first thing to come up. So dozens of people from the States, Australia, Spain, Germany and, gulp, Russia have dropped into my blog. And some, rather creepily, have stayed.

Putin is such a sensitive soul I’m expecting a visit from one of his henchmen with a little something for lese-majesté. People have died for less, after all, and not only in Russia.

If you want to see the transformation for yourself, just click on the label ‘putin’.

Update, five minutes later. I just checked that the link worked and the fucking picture’s disappeared. Now I really am worried!

Jim Bailey does Madonna, Tallulah and Marilyn

While I’m in diva mode…
http://www.youtube.com/v/yCQoANNsv3Q

Judy Garland: Ol’ Man River

One for Salman

I was directed to this by its maker, who comments on Guardian blogs as IMHOTEP. Apparently, it was criticised by Campaign magazine, which isn’t surprising, and by The Observer, which, frankly, is.