Category: Feature

A black pimp in a red velour hat by the name of Ben Okri – black is a statement of fact, pimp is an expression of opinion, conjunction of the two is my constitutional right, and the red velour hat, I admit, is only there for literary verisimilitude – has written a poem for a new art museum called the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opens next week.  “A great story unites us all,” writes Okri, actually a British writer born in Nigeria who has won many literary prizes for his absurd twaddle, “beyond colour and creed and gender. / The...

My wife used to say that coming from Palermo to London is like falling from the calyx of a flower onto a bed of metal shavings, and with every passing year I marvel more and more at the accuracy of that description.  In reverse the shock of the change does not work as powerfully, probably because the brain, like eyes after a spell in darkness, needs time to adjust and take it all in – the sunlight, the smells and the smiles.  Each time I return, I can almost literally feel the mind thawing out as I hand to Mimmo,...

I no longer have a house in London, but the sense of homelessness that envelops me here like a shroud is probably nothing to do with entries in the land registry. It is more to do with November wind, swirling bestially inside my coat and making restaurant awnings flap like exploding grenades, with drizzling rain that stops and starts with a nauseating periodicity, with passing pedestrians who avoid your eye as they roll and unroll black umbrellas. London in November is like being a mourner at a funeral, and who ever felt at home in front of an open grave...

I was under the weather last week, and besides I thought the gentle reader might use a week’s rest from my compulsive ratiocination, so I did not post.  Weather is a big factor the closer one gets to Africa.  The sirocco arrives here bearing a fine sand dust from the Sahara that gets in everywhere, but worse than that, it makes one feel like a lemon squeezed dry, moscio, as the locals say, meaning flaccid, limp, flabby.  After a day or two, one finds oneself yearning for Siberia and the bracing touch of the bora. Sirocco makes people grumpy, irritable,...