Yearly Archive: 2020

“Giorgio Armani: provocative outfits are a kind of rape,” was yesterday the banner headline in a British newspaper.  Another newspaper went with current events instead of applied philosophy: “Rapist Harvey Weinstein is rushed to hospital in the ambulance that was transferring him from court to prison after shouting ‘I’m innocent’ as he was convicted.” Armani has never made a piece of women’s clothing that is even remotely feminine, so his ploy to exploit the me-too trend for personal gain is just good business practice.  The other headline is more poignant.  It has the characteristic breathlessness that accompanies reports of popular...

The renowned organist Marianna Vysotskaya has been staying with us while my wife, who is a friend of hers, is away in Moscow, preparing for a recital at the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory.  Marianna is here in Sicily to play three concerts, one at San Pietro in Trapani, one at the Palermo Cathedral, and one next Sunday in Messina. The sailing has not been smooth, as everyone in the district, on seeing me in the company of an unknown woman, feels duty bound to mention my wife in a preternaturally loud voice.  “When is Olga back?” thunders Signor Baldo...

Well, Brexit did happen in the end, contrary to my son’s prediction of a Thirty Years’ War, and we toasted the news with vodka.  I spent the following week recovering and reading up on the history of that magic potion, learning much about it I had not known.  No Russian I’ve ever met, for instance, would tell you that the word itself, “vodka,” is scarcely more than a hundred years old.  Instead, for many centuries, and well into the nineteenth, the term “bread wine,” or simply “wine,” was generally used to describe forty-proof alcohol made from grain. Strangely enough, when...