majrodgers

Well, I certainly put my foot in my mouth with my most recent post-the one in which I was whining and opining about the Winter Olympics being a yawn, yawn event. My post was hardly cold to the touch when I found that they, or some secretive delegate, had struck back at me with a kick in the teeth so devastating that it sent me reeling! The first hint of impending wrath was dealt last Monday when Chelsea, that much-hated club from that much-hated London, went to the Etihad Stadium and beat Manchester City-the first home game of the season in which City dropped a point!

And worse was to follow!

Since August last, we football/soccer fans in the US have had our eyes glued to the NBC Sports Network at weekends and some weekday evenings in order to watch live the Barclay’s Premier League matches. Well, horror of horrors, today I carried out my customary Saturday morning tuning to Channel 448, the Comcast cable channel that airs the BPL games in these parts, only to find that Olympic speed skating events were being shown! It appears that NBC have the Olympic franchise and some genius (that’s a pejorative) has decided that there will be more revenue from thrusting these non-sports events down our throats for the next three weeks, than would be gained by showing a few BPL games; and just when the top of the league is being heavily contested in the run-up to the season’s end.

I suppose I shot myself in the foot by complaining so loudly about these games, and now my vociferousness (a nice 14-letter word!) is being revenged. But I am not repentant-one has to stand up for one’s principles. Send the Olympic Games back to Olympia, or wherever, and give us our football back.

Grrr!!

So the 2014 Winter Olympic games are soon to begin in Sochi, Russia;-yawn, yawn!

In my less-than-humble opinion the only activity in the Winter Games that can be legitimately called a sport is the hockey tournament; here at least there is a bunch of burly guys crashing into each other and aiming to thump an invisible object into a goal. The rest of the yawn, yawn is about who can slide down a mountain a nanosecond faster than anybody else, or a bunch of scantily-clad young ladies prancing around on the ice. Not that I have anything against scantily-clad lasses throwing their legs in the air mind you, but let’s not dignify it by calling it a sport, much less an Olympic one; for me skating is as much a sport as is synchronized swimming, an activity also performed by scantily-clad young ladies throwing their legs into the air-must be a connection here. Speaking of synchronized swimming leads me into the main point, and that is to urge the powers-that-be to rethink the whole Olympic organization. Let us remember that the natural habitat for most of Homo sapiens is terra firma. The large majority of us do not live, work, propagate or expire in water, either the liquid variety or any of its solid manifestations, igloo-dwellers excepted. Given this, I believe that the Olympic body should decide to hold a terra firma meeting and a non-terra firma one. The terra firma one should comprise the games that are played on our natural habitat, viz., land, and will include the track and field and ball sports, i.e. the real ones. These could be the summer games. The liquid and solid water activities could be lumped together and held at some other time, preferably during long periods of TV blackout. I realize that the inclusion of the huge swimming and diving program into the frozen water events would cause scheduling problems, so I recommend that swimming events should be limited to one type of arm action, perhaps freestyle, the one that we used to call the crawl. After all, to have four stroke styles for every distance borders on the comical; imagine Usain Bolt running in four different styles in track, such as forwards, backwards, hopping and waving his arms in the air! I understand that limiting swimming to a single style would reduce the number of medals that the USA would win, but what the heck, they have been milking it for long enough. Speaking of the icy stuff, I would like to report that the weather here of late has been most non-Floridian. Since the turn of the year we have been having our very own mini-polar vortex and the temperatures during my sunrise walking spells have been in the mid-30s; decidedly chilly. However, it is hard to complain when I see that Tom K and my other chums in BG and the girls in the Windy City are down at 0F and less. My Yahoo weather app tells me that the daytime HIGH in BG next Tuesday will be -2F, definitely Siberian, and not for the likes of me, thank you.

I would like to use this blog as a vehicle for conveying my warmest wishes to you, my dear readers, on this December Solstice 2013.

For me the winter Solstice has far greater significance than any of the man-constructed festivals that clutter this time of year; it has no need of myths or fables or faith to support it, as it is a real astronomical occurrence. This day is a turning point in the apparent harmonic motion of the sun; it ceases moving to the south, and from today it will move in a northerly direction, until its next turning point at the summer Solstice.

Thus the winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere presages longer days, shorter nights, and Mother Nature’s renewal of herself through a surge of photosynthetic activity. Had the calendar makers had been more alert, today would have been labeled January 1.

And I will drink to that!!

While driving home yesterday from the establishment where Tom K. and I had partaken of an early evening beverage, I caught sight of a very tiny sliver of new moon in (weak) conjunction with Venus. Being of a romantic nature I took this sighting to be some sort of congratulatory sign for my having renewed my driving license that same morning. You may wonder why congratulations would be necessary for such a seeming ordinary task, so I will enlighten you.

In these parts, driving (I refuse to use the Americanism “driver’s” in front of license) licenses come due for renewal on one’s birthday and since this event was in the offing, last week I decided to get a jump on it and do the deed. So in all innocence I trotted off to the license bureau to accomplish the task. I confidently handed my expiring license to the nice lady behind the desk and asked her to renew it. I suppose that it was the way that I spoke that caused her to ask,

“Are you an American citizen?”

To which I replied in the negative.

“I need to see your green card (resident visa) and your Social Security card.”

Confidence rapidly draining from me, I replied,

“I don’t have them with me, and the whereabouts of my SS card are completely mysterious.”

[I recall having this card issued to me in Berkeley, CA in 1966 when I was a postdoc there, but where it has been since, I have no idea. In fact I have never needed to show it, as I committed the number to memory, when I had one, and that has always been sufficient, but not with the License Bureau, apparently.]

“I suggest that you go to the Social Security office and ask for a replacement.” The aforesaid kind lady remarked. So, tail between legs, I departed her presence.

The next day I drove over to the SS office in a pouring rain storm, checked in at the front desk, got a number and waited to be called forward. To my surprise, I had hardly sat down when I was called; such promptness is most unusual in the offices of the Federal Government. It was as I was walking to the service window that apprehensiveness hit me: are these guys not on furlough as the government is shut down? The fact that I had found the front door unlocked and that I had been called up tended to calm me down. I told the gent at the window that I was there to get a new card as my original one was lost. He replied that this was not possible: in the shutdown period only a few activities were being attended to and new cards was not one of these; I was to come back when the government had opened up again. Hopes dashed, I went out into the rain and drove off to the License Bureau, to tell this tale of woe on the kind lady there and to throw myself on her mercy. I should explain for my overseas readers that the License Bureau is an arm of the State of Ohio government, not the Federal one, so they are not shut down. There is no mercy there, however; rules are rules are rules, and they must be followed to the letter.

There is an exquisite irony here, because whenever I (or any other US resident or citizen) need to confirm my identity for whatever purpose, I am asked to show a “picture ID” and the everyday way of doing this is to present my driving license. This works anywhere in the US, not only in the State where the license was issued; it is akin to a national identity card. The only people who do not recognize the license as sufficient proof of identity are the kind ladies in the License Bureau, who issue the damned thing in the first place!

Having explained my predicament to the LB lady this second time, she informed me that there were other ways of proving identity to her, such as a government document/letter that had my Social Security number inscribed thereon. Here I breathed a sigh of relief, because I knew that I could satisfy this requirement, and so yesterday I went once more, armed with my expiring license, my green card and three documents from my tax files that had my SSN on them, I presented the package to the lady together with the fee of $25, and shortly thereafter I emerged, clutching a brand new, hot-off-the-press (literally) driving license, which is valid for five years. I hope to live to repeat the process at the time of my 82^nd birthday. Of course, in that event I shall have completely forgotten this episode and will no doubt find myself repeating it

All this rigmarole was not applicable until recently, because driving licenses used to have the holder’s SSN printed on them, being taken off to prevent identity theft, I am told. The older I get, the more I realize that the “good old days” are gone forever, nobody trusts anybody anymore, and you had better get used to the new order or check yourself into the old folks home!

This is political theater at its most delicious; President Obama puts his Syria strike on hold to await a vote of approval by Congress. Yes, friends, that is the same Congress that has determinedly and unfailingly turned away every proposal coming out of the White House since Obama took up residence there some five years ago. The Republican Party has a majority in the House of Representatives and enough votes in the Senate to deny passage of any meaningful legislation. Republicans have such a aversion for this President that they do everything that they can to prevent him gaining anything that could be construed as a political victory, hence the gridlock that Washington has been in for the duration of the Obama presidency. So does Obama’s decision to send this to Congress mean that he wants it to suffer the same fate as Cameron’s request to the British parliament a couple of days before? Maybe so, but not necessarily; it is possible that he has seized an opportunity for putting the Republicans on the horns of a delightful dilemma. Republicans are persons whose natural tendency is to use America’s might at every opening to send hurt to any foreigners who displease them, so they are intrinsically inclined to do a bit of Assad bashing. Obama has very slickly and firmly positioned himself on the moral high ground by castigating the Assad folks for gassing their own people, and threatening retribution; he asserts that the US intelligence community has firm evidence for this transgression of international law and moral righteousness, and he points out that the US Navy has ships positioned in the Eastern Mediterranean equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles locked and loaded onto Syrian targets of the appropriate degree of significance. They are ready to fire on his command and he gave every sign that he would pull the trigger. That he now turns this decision over to Congress means that he wants to put this august body on the spot; either support your President (anathema) or else open yourself to accusations of being lily-livered in the face of Assad and his henchmen-a true stroke of Obama genius.

The delicious icing on this cake is that Congress, as we speak, is in recess, with the members presumably in their districts consulting with their constituents. The polls tell us that the US electorate, while rightly outraged about the gassing of civilians, would prefer that the US does nothing drastic about it, fearing yet another war looming in the Arab territories with consequent detriment to American lives and treasure. Thus the congressmen might be hearing the go-slow from the grass roots and when the debate and vote eventually come, Obama could get the same message that Cameron got the other day. Another huge factor in all this is the Jewish lobby in Congress who, prodded by Israel, will be giving their all to persuade senators and representatives to vote in favor of the strike, thinking that it would send a message of deterrence to Iran, that nation whose shadow looms large over the Eastern Mediterranean.

Israel is in the unfortunate position of being sandwiched geographically between Syria to the north and Egypt to the south. These are both Moslem nations that have been ruled by despotic regimes for a generation or more and Israel has found ways to forge accommodations with them. It was not in Israel’s interest to see Mubarak fall in the political turmoil that has become euphemistically called the Arab Spring, and similarly it will not be in their interests to see Assad fall and be replaced by a government of Moslem fundamentalists. It is in no one’s interest, Israel’s most of all, to see regime change in Syria; the Assad regime might be worrisome, but it is less worrisome than having the country next door run by fundamentalists.  If only they would pursue their civil war with armaments that kill in a more politically correct manner.

It promises to be an interesting fall and winter…

Until further notice, this blog will be called “The View from the Knacker’s Yard”. For the uninitiated, a knacker’s yard is a place, a field or a compound where horses that are no longer capable of working are taken to await the attention of the slaughterer, soon to be followed by the tanner and the glue factor. In metaphorical terms, the knacker’s yard can be thought of as the vestibule in the house of the Grim Reaper and in a down-to-earth sense it can be identified with Retirement, a state of being that has proven to be quite pleasurable for me-so far.

Cattle, pigs and sheep, and even goats, I suppose, have their end of life experience at a different slaughterhouse from that of the horses, since their corpses are processed for human consumption and certain standards of hygiene need to be applied. But whether you are a horse, a pig, or any other of our four-legged friends (and the two-legged ones, with wings), you have an after-life. Your death represents an opportunity for you to be transmuted into victuals in the form of a steak, a sausage, a lamb shank, a sweetbread, or a chicken breast, among many other goodies. Not only that, but the non-edible parts of you might become leather, soap, candles (tallow), and adhesives (glue).You will recognize that my tongue is somewhat in my cheek here, since we all know that it is the need of humans for sustenance that brings the lambs and their parents and friends to the slaughterhouse and is the driving force behind the huge ranching and meat packing industries that we have come to know and love.

Please don’t misunderstand me here, I am not about to regale you with a tirade on animal rights and so forth – I enjoy a well-marbled, blood-dripping rib eye steak as much as the next man. No, what struck me when I began to think about the knacker’s yard and things pertaining thereto are the differences between the treatment of the corpses of humans and those of the animals that we eat. A pig, for example, is born and raised solely for its food value; thus pigs and their comrades in the food business are never going to live out their natural lifetimes-they will be exsanguinated in their prime of life. Not so humans; we are born and raised for a variety of reasons, perhaps religious, perhaps romantic, perhaps unintentionally, but none is to do with our being a food source. Most of the time (war excepted) we humans are encouraged to live as long as possible, well past our physical and intellectual primes; indeed, society goes to great lengths to invent procedures to combat diseases with the aim of improving our chances of living to ages long past those that our great grandfathers enjoyed. And when all the known life-lengthening procedures have been tried and we fall into “that sleep of death…from whose bourn no traveler returns”, our corpses are treated with a level of reverence and respect far beyond that which our living selves were afforded (usually). There is never a suggestion of tanning or rendering-no recycling of humans, thank you very much!

On the other hand, is a lucrative business prospect going begging? Just as we have the opportunity of donating our internal organs for the benefit of our comrades who have need of them, could we not offer up our skin (just another organ, after all) for sale to a specialist tanner, perhaps for the price of a interment/cremation of what is left? I can envisage a good market for upscale purses, belts and the like manufactured from human leather. Having a purse, for example, made from the skin of a deceased movie actress, rock star, footballer or royal could carry a certain cachet in the world of the upwardly mobile.

Moving on from ghoulish thoughts and peering out at the real world from our knacker’s yard, one of the more intriguing happenings in the recent news is the case of Anthony Wiener. Mr. Wiener shares his name with a Viennese sausage, a connection which adds a modicum of amusement to the story. This gentleman was a long-serving congressman from New York who, a couple of years ago was found to be sexting young ladies i.e sending them sexually explicit text messages on Twitter. The explicit part of the messages was a photograph of his torso which demonstrated that he was not a sufferer of erectile dysfunction. He resigned his office and went away, presumably chastened. Now he is back in the news, this time as a candidate for Mayor of New York City-what balls! Not only that, it seems that he has been continuing his sexting activity in the interim. I can only imagine that the good citizens of New York will dispose of him at the polling station, but who knows? The US has a rich history in having crazies of all kinds seeking and gaining elected office.

What this situation does for me is to point up the different way that internet activity is regarded from that same activity carried out in the street. For example, were I to dress my torso as Mr. Wiener’s, put a raincoat over it, go to downtown Bowling Green and open the coat to (flash) a young lady, there would be a commotion; cell phones would emerge, the cops would be called and I would be hustled to jail, deservedly so. Surely Mr. Wiener’s activity is no different in principle from my flashing, and yet the only gauntlet that he has had to run so far is that of the national media. Whoever said that fact is stranger than fiction sure got it right!

As I get older I realize more and more just how difficult it is to understand human nature. Allow me to give you one example of my lack of understanding.

Some 250 years ago British colonists in North America became so disenchanted with the tyrannical rule of the British monarchy that they rose up in what became a bloody rebellion, out of which a new nation emerged, wherein everything British became hated. The names of everyday objects became Americanized; for example, chips became French fries (although this nomenclature became a little shaken in the early Bush years when the US became enraged that France refused to join its adventurism in Iraq, and Freedom fries were born). Toilets became restrooms, flats became apartments, spanners became wrenches, the letter “z” replaced the letter “s” in many words and colour, rumour, and humour lost their “u’s”, but glamour did not.  Such was the hatred of all things British that the citizens of the new nation even devised a different way of using a knife and fork to transport food from plate to mouth!

With this in mind, I was amazed (although not really) this morning at the gym that all four giant TV sets that are tuned to the four major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox) had simultaneously decided that they must devote a significant fraction of their morning shows to informing this erstwhile rebellious nation that the Duchess of Cambridge had gone into labor and had been taken to hospital. As far as I could observe, the anchors and invited experts in such things were fairly gushing about the upcoming emergence of what they are referring to as a “royal baby”. One reporter, with the gates of Buckingham palace as a backdrop, appeared to be dancing on the spot in her excitement (maybe a visit to the restroom was overdue?). So great is the furor of royal admiration here that the impression persists that nobody connects these modern-day royals with King George III, of whom the US Declaration of Independence pronounces, among other things:

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

It would be hard to believe that the US media of those days would be as gushing about the impending birth of a future monarch as we see today.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to return to the US from my Spring Sojourn in Italy. My arrival was on July 4, a day on which America, in its entirety, celebrates its independence from the oppression of the British monarch with a national holiday, cookouts and firework displays. All very proper, of course, and your correspondent has himself attended such festivities and joined in the fun. On none of these occasions could I discern that the words of Thomas Jefferson indicting George III were actually remembered; more to the point was that America became independent by whatever means necessary, and let’s celebrate that enjoyable result. Oh, and by the way, let’s all cuddle up to that once-most-hated British monarchy.

As a final note, written in the preamble of the self-same Declaration of Independence is the famous phrase “all men are created equal” (which at the time referred to white males only) will certainly not apply to the duchess’s forthcoming offspring. Even though she, and her eggs, are of common stock, application of the royal jelly confers a lofty rank to which all the rest of us must deferentially tug our forelock. Would that I had one!

Should anyone ever read those utterings that I call poems <http://majrpoems.com> they might have noticed that I consistently use the adjective gay, or its adverbial cousin gaily. This is not an accident; it is a purposed attempt to remind the reader that gay, as an adjective, has been in the English language since the 12th century; it comes from the French word gai, and means joyful, happy, bright, light-hearted, and so on. In another sense it was used in the 19^th century as meaning licentious or immoral. But during the 1960s, it was adopted by the community of homosexual males as a euphemism, or weasel-word, to describe their behavioral predilection. Now this “new” meaning has become so dominant that it is impossible to use the word gay without the reader/listener jumping to the immediate conclusion that one is referring to homosexuality. Here is what the on line Free Dictionary <www.thefreedictionary.com> has to say about the usage of gay:

“By far the most common and up-to-date use of the word gay is in reference to being homosexual. Other senses of the word have become uncommon and dated.”

“Uncommon and dated”? Bah! Humbug!

Here we have one of the few, very expressive, three-letter, one syllable words in the English language, which in my early years meant something to delight in, on a par with joy; only to find that it has been purloined. I certainly understand why homosexuals would want to stop being called the names that they have been called-I resist listing them-all of which have ugly, derogatory connotations. But why, o why, would they adopt gay of all words to describe their sexual preference; there must be hundreds that they could have picked that would upset nobody (not even I).

How about posh? Surely nobody uses this stupid word these days? Posh means smart, fashionable, upper-class, etc., it connotes a moneyed-class and even sounds snobbish; it deserves to be cast into the word wilderness. If there were one or two posh-users still around in the 1960s when gay was so brutally filched, were the word posh adopted to describe homosexuality, it would have discouraged them from ever using it, and the word would happily cease to exist in English usage, except within the homosexual connotation. It would disappear from proper usage, just as gay has disappeared, and that would not exercise me one jot or tittle. It has been said that posh is an acronym and not a real word, anyway, meaning Port Out Starboard Home, referring to the cooler (and thus more expensive) region of ships steaming from England to India in the mid-1800s, a no longer fashionable activity.

Of course, had the homosexual folk adopted posh then Mrs. Adams’ classy daughter Victoria would not have been given the soubriquet Posh Spice and then, who knows, might not have been attractive to David Beckham and thus, according to my brand of logical determinism, the world would not have had to deal with their kids’ androgynous names, viz., Harper, Brooklyn, Cruz, or Romeo, although I would put a little money on Romeo being a boy.

Talking about the names of celebrity footballers’ offspring, I see that the Rooney’s now have two sons whom they have named Klay and Kai; whatever happened to Joe and Fred, for goodness sake? Both Beckham and Rooney play, or have played, football for Manchester United and maybe that is where the craze for weird names comes from; you can expect most anything from that gang! Pity the poor kids though, when their school mates are let loose on them; no amount of money and status of the parents can alleviate the psychological scarring by the taunts of heartless children against a perceived flaw in a kid. Of course there is always home-schooling, but at some point in life the kids have to face their peers and run the gauntlet.

Where was I? Oh yes, going on about gay and posh. Well, I think that perhaps I have said enough about this subject; I have been told that sometimes I tend to go on a bit too long. Nevertheless I intend to continue my one-man campaign to keep the true meaning of the gay word in the world of the blog (if only mine), and I shall continue to refrain from the use of weasel-words when referring to homosexuals.

By way of disclosure: in general, I have nothing against homosexuality; I tend to be of the live and let live persuasion, but as I think I have indicated above, I am most unhappy about their distortion of one of the most evocative words in the English language.

My guide and mentor in many things, including the street language of Italian youth, is Alessandro (Ale) Bertozzi, the co-owner of Bistro 22, the establishment in CDP where I spend a significant fraction of my waking hours. A photo taken last June on the White Night celebration is affixed. Another co-owner is his sister Greta, a young lady of considerable grace and charm, of whom more will be said later.

Anyway, back to the street language. The other day Ale and I were conversing in our usual mixture of languages, and for some reason, I forget what, I was interested in learning the Italian slang expression for that cleft in one’s anatomy that divides the left buttock from the right one. In recent years this cleft has materialized into common view, much as ladies’ navels came on the scene a few years before, because of the diktats of fashion to which our young (and not so young) persons are enslaved. Apparently, the fashion industry, who have always been noted for charging a higher price for using less material, in order to make savings in their cloth purchases, have lowered the waistlines of their products to such an extent that pants and the like, that used to be strapped securely around waistlines, now hang precariously from hips. In order that these self-same garments do not succumb to the laws of physics and fall off during one’s everyday activities, they need to be made tight around the hipline, an activity that has the effect of squeezing the buttocks together, thus accentuating the aforesaid cleft. We see a similar effect on the bosoms of ladies, caused by their wearing undergarments of particular design. Going back to the buttock cleft, which becomes especially evident when persons squat or bend over, my personal preference is not to see it at all; in fact, I find this anatomical curiosity to be rather repulsive in young gentlemen. However, if it must be exposed, then my preference is for the female version, a spectacle that tends to generate a measure of pleasurable warmth.

Leaving emotions and feelings aside and returning to the theme, Ale informs me that this phenomenon is referred to in Italy as “sorriso”, which translates to “smile”, or “grin”, and I find this linguistic interpretation to be exceedingly more mellifluous than the American term of “butt crack”. Even at advanced age, there is always something to be learned, it seems.

And so to Greta, whose beauty and charisma can only be hinted at in a photograph. Greta is Tuscan, born and bred, and like all such people, she speaks in the way that Tuscans do, which is different from all other Italians. All the regions of Italy have their own dialects, which are variants of the Italian language, But Tuscany is unique (as far as I know) in the way it pronounces some common words; in Tuscany you do not hear a hard “c” or a hard “g”, both are softened and aspirated into what might be confused with a throat-clearing sound. Thus, Coca Cola becomes something like Hoha Hola (Pepsi, fortunately stays the same), and if you want ice in it you would ask for Hoha Hola con hiaccio (from ghiaccio)-you get the picture. The Tuscans would have you believe that the Tuscan dialect is the true Italian. Having lived for extended periods in CDP in recent years and grown to love the place and its people, I have become sort of attuned to this, but the other morning I had stopped at Bistro 22 for a macchiato, an espresso spotted with milk.  Greta prepared this in her delightful way and placed it on the bar before me and asked if I wanted “hahow”. This really stopped me for a few seconds. “What was she asking me?” Then it dawned on me; hahow is Tuscan dialect for “cacao”, viz., powdered chocolate, or cocoa, that many Italians sprinkle onto their cappuccino or macchiato. Incidentally, she refers to a caffé macchiato as a mini-happuccino!

Service from Greta always comes with a smile-on her face!

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…