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
The news from my alma mater… Ah, but the gentle reader may not know that as a young man I spent many years in litigation with Yale University, which sought to shut down the literary magazine I edited for publishing poems that rhymed and, more generally, for airing views unsuitable to a modern place of learning.
Some years ago I knew a lady, gainfully divorced from a Russian oligarch, who turned to me with the plea to find her an honest lawyer in London. This made me privy to the substance of her predicament, which was basically that the fortune she kept in a famously named Swiss bank had been pilfered
Zaatar, as the gentle reader may recall from his travels, is a blend of herbs and seeds popular for centuries throughout the Middle East. Sprinkle it on toasted flatbread with a spray of olive oil and, even if you aren’t wearing a checkerboard towel round your head, a delicious breakfast awaits you
I set this conundrum once before, in another forum over which our founder was then presiding. It bears being repeated, however, all the more so as it is to do with the intertwining of friendship and family ties which has been my subject here of late. But permit me to start from a little farther afield.
