The smell of burned cheese and cheap frying oil overhanging a street, such as Palermo’s savagely pedestrianized Via Maqueda, signals the presence of the mass tourist. The tourist is both predator and prey, the collective criminal and the collective victim of his crime. He is here on Sicily to pursue happiness, but instead has it rudely imposed on him by people whose idea of a transient’s happiness is their own enrichment.
Hallowmas, which is today, marks the start of the pomegranate season, a fruit that evokes the myth of the goddess and her chthonic descent into winter. With persimmon and prickly pear, pomegranate forms a trio of late autumn fruit which, at least on this side of the Messina Strait, is largely overlooked by cultivators. A forager’s dream, they just grow, often by the roadside. They are the partridge, woodcock, and grouse of the fructiferous world.
Zionism is much in the news these days, as are its many antipodes, and for reasons that are, lamentably, all too clear, the whole subject is a journalistic minefield. Rather than treading lightly, however, I seek forgiveness of the gentle reader in advance should an inadvertent explosion disturb his otherwise placid Wednesday afternoon.
In the wake of that dinner party in Brussels the other week, a couple of images haunt me. Well, haunt is perhaps too dramatic a way of putting it, but they have certainly stuck in my mind.
“Let us not argue,” I said to the neighbor on my left, who had just boasted to me of “meeting Putin. You know it’s his birthday today?” The dinner was a seated affair – forty tables of eight – in lavishness roughly at midpoint between a royal gala and a bar mitzvah in the Hamptons. The host addressed the buzzing swarm in Flemish, as all but a handful were compatriots, but as bad luck would have it one of the English speakers was the neighbor to my left.
What sorrows I have, I drown in brandy. In Armagnac, ideally, and it always strikes me as unjust that this remarkable panacea is essentially regarded as a niche tipple, a rich man’s foible, a postprandial showpiece at a far remove from the alcoholic mainstream of gin, whisky, and vodka. Even Armagnac’s big brother, Cognac, is relegated to the margins of wine lists, to say nothing of local brandies like Italy’s very passable Vecchia Romagna.
The twilight hour before bedtime which any sensible boy hopes will never arrive is the high point of his day, and young Vasily, who will be two next month, is no exception. We watch music videos – more or less the same playlist night after night after night – while I smoke my Toscano and savor my brandy, if there is any. The miracle is that I never get tired of these musical selections, whereof by now I know every darn word by heart, and anyone who has ever experienced a true miracle wants the world to hear about it.
Some years ago, I recall, a great deal of postprandial talk in England revolved around the term “nanny state.” This did not come from libertarians, anarchists, or some other political fringe, but was very much a mainstream Tory gripe. The state meddles, they complained as they passed the port to the left, it interferes and stifles.
“Today I harvested honey,” a reader has written apropos of last week’s post, and naturally I envied him the instant I read it. As an adult I always lived in and was drawn to cities, as this chimed in with my nostalgia for civilization on the wane, but the bucolic, which I had richly experienced as a child, ever beckoned the prodigal to return. Civilization is temporal, like our life itself. Nature is like our afterlife, eternally kind to some and eternally brutal to others.
The gentle reader is no doubt familiar with the genre of mind game wherein a wholly hypothetical situation, such as being marooned on a desert island, is combined with a highly specific dilemma, such as which book or recording one would take there if one could. The field of speculation is almost limitless.
