Summertime and the living’s not just not easy, but when, even in the shade, it gets hot enough to fry an egg sunny side up it’s pretty much impossible. July, as the gentle reader may have read, was globally the hottest month since records began, and it now looks like August will be even hotter. You just can’t beat this kind of heat with mint juleps.
“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
Though now back in my own bed, thoughts of the fancy hotel where we stayed in Apulia keep me awake at night. What is it about such places? The first answer that comes to mind is that it has something to do with the success of “virtual worlds,”
It was like something out of a movie, one of those Eastern European flicks of vaguely subversive import in fading color from directors with names like Tomasz or Janos which in my childhood the dissidents of the day so cravenly admired.
The gentle reader, I’m sure, will not be surprised to discover that my understanding of professional football – or soccer, as he probably knows it – is limited to the encyclopedic fact that the game is played, predominantly with the players’ feet, using a ball once made of pigskin and since the Orwell year 1984 manufactured in synthetic material.
I had planned to be late with this week’s post to recount something of Rome, but our visit here developed in ways so spectacularly unforeseen – such as five hours on the train from Naples to Milan to meet one friend for a saffron risotto and then another three hours to make it to Rome in time for a spaghetti amatriciana with another – that I decided to throw in the towel and just write what’s on my mind. And what’s on my mind is the reading I’ve done during those eight hours on the Freccia Rossa.
“How Much Land a Man Needs” is a story by Tolstoy wherein the grim graybeard hints that a man needs but six feet of it for his grave, and there I take my inspiration this Wednesday. My son was visiting here last week, and for a lark we set off to Polizzi Generosa, a town of some 3000 inhabitants in the verdant hills of the Madonie.
Perhaps one needs to be a writer, or at any rate a storyteller by temperament, a habitual raconteur, to feel it, but for a man of such disposition there is no greater frustration than trying to relate an anecdote to the driver of a car while in the passenger seat
