Category: Wednesday’s Child

I used to buy honey from a local, who would make an appointment with me to meet on a street corner. Bought clandestinely, in the manner of drugs, it tasted like heaven.

I just got back from Florence, whither I had been summoned to give a meandering, charmingly unintelligible ramble at the unveiling of a book to which I contributed an introductory essay.

Generally, as my father always said, a birthday is an occasion for rending one’s garments and scattering ashes over one’s head…

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.”