As hinted (?) in the title your roving correspondent has departed his winter quarters in Sarasota FL and has returned to his spring hideout in Castiglione della Pescaia, IT. Unfortunately, it seems that somebody, the astronomer royal perhaps, forgot to tell the spring to get here in time for my return. The wintry weather continues with rain, cold temperatures and occasional high winds to whip up the waves-altogether a pain in the you-know-where, especially since I neglected to bring a ton of winter gear to wear. I have resorted to putting on several layers of undershirts, tee-shirts and the like under my outer layer. At times like this one has to eschew the dictates of fashion and try to avoid freezing. A couple of people have told me that all will change on April 27, when the arctic air will recede from southern Europe. How they know such things I know not ; perhaps the aforesaid astronomer royal has a web site where it is all written?

Very little has changed in this little town since I left it at the end of June last year, there is a bit of construction going on down at the port where a long-standing restaurant has been torn down to be replaced by another one.

But there is one new item that has intrigued me greatly since first I clapped eyes upon it: allow me to entertain you with a photograph.

Yes, it is a condom dispenser affixed to the wall of a para-farmacia, which for the uninitiated is a store that sells the usual stuff that a pharmacy sells except for prescription drugs. It has appeared since I left last summer and it is my very first sighting of such a contraption. Of course, it may be that such things are commonplace in Europe, but in the last few years I have been spending about a third of every year in Italy and I have never seen one until now. In any case, it brings several thoughts to mind. One is that this is Italy, the nation that surrounds the Vatican, that landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome. Wikipedia tells me that the Vatican City is the smallest internationally-recognized independent state in the world by both area and population. Small it may be, but the Vatican speaks with a loud voice to the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, including Italian ones. Italy and the Vatican state have a special relationship; after all, it is not long ago that to consider having a non-Italian Pope would have been absurd (and it may well be again!). Thus, one might anticipate that Italians would hear the voice of the Vatican very loudly, given its proximity. What that voice has consistently said since the earliest of days is that “contraception is an intrinsic evil.” And yet here, in this picturesque little town overlooking the beautiful Tyrrhenian Sea, next door to the Carabinieri building, the Durex company has erected situated a dispenser of these intrinsically evil devices that are manufactured primarily to interrupt that most natural course of events, viz., procreation. The anti-Christ is alive and well and is my neighbor!

That word “Durex” brings back dusty memories of my youth. In my ’tween and teen years I was a student at an all-boys school where sex education was obtained from street corners or from well-thumbed salacious publications that somebody’s older brother had got his grubby hands on. During this introduction to the lessons of life it soon emerged that should you ever, by some stroke of fate, have an “encounter” with a young person of the opposite gender (the chances of which were about equal to those of winning the lottery today), then you would need to use a Durex, aka rubber, aka French letter, to accomplish the work of the fore-mentioned anti-Christ. By the way, I think that I must have been in my forties when I first heard the word “condom”. In Britain of the 50’s, and perhaps still today, the common name for the male contraceptive was “a Durex”, thus the Durex company achieved similar status to companies like Hoover and Xerox, having their company names becoming generic names of devices for vacuuming carpets and photocopying. I am uncertain as to whether Durex was used as a verb, however!

Not being any good at winning lotteries, I was never faced with the task of actually obtaining a Durex, but I certainly dreamed about having a need for one. The best situation that one could imagine was that the dream girl had brought one with her in anticipation of the rising need. What a blessed relief that would have been! But could one rely on such a piece of forethought; by a girl, of all people? Those of us who had once been in the Boy Scouts remembered that we were taught to “be prepared”, so true to this teaching you would prepare yourself, perhaps driven by the thought that were there not one of those deplorable objects at hand, then one’s chances of having one’s way would be severely diminished, approaching zero in most cases. This line of argument brings us to the spot where the rubber hits the road, to use a simile that I have long wanted to use. Where to get such an article? The answer was at the chemist’s (i.e. pharmacist’s) shop; but such a place was populated by customers and by staff, all of whom lived in the neighborhood and if I had had the cojones to stand in line and when it came to my turn, blurt out “A packet of French letters, please”, the news would have got back to my family in no time and I would have suffered severe retribution, not for planning to have intercourse, but for shaming the family by letting all the world know about it.

Those were the days, my friends…