Category: Wednesday’s Child

I am reminded of a passage in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History.

I reason, however, that I’m but a step away from my seventieth year in this vale of tears and an old bore can always produce the plain and honest excuse that he is old.

“The Bolshevik mentality is as old as history. Cain, in the Old Testament, had the mind of a Bolshevik.”

Soon thereafter I received a call from my wife, informing me that Nikolai “has ADHD” and the school was proposing to “put him on Ritalin.

Time was, people had ideals. These they copied as best they could –“plagiarized” is the term on my mind at the moment – using only their imagination to attain some semblance of parity.

Time was, construction workers high up on the scaffolding would whistle at classy dames passing below.

The song with which this buffoon entertains the lunch crowd before passing round the hat is “Bella Ciao.”

A couple of times a year I cook borsch. Fits of nostalgia aren’t the reason, and I would make this wholesome soup more often if beets, its principal ingredient, were easier to come by in the south of Italy.

I would be somewhat offended if the gentle reader thought even for a moment that I had watched this film before writing about it.

Continuing last week’s ruminations about things that endure and are to be celebrated for their virtue…