The renowned organist Marianna Vysotskaya has been staying with us while my wife, who is a friend of hers, is away in Moscow, preparing for a recital at the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory.  Marianna is here in Sicily to play three concerts, one at San Pietro in Trapani, one at the Palermo Cathedral, and one next Sunday in Messina. The sailing has not been smooth, as everyone in the district, on seeing me in the company of an unknown woman, feels duty bound to mention my wife in a preternaturally loud voice.  “When is Olga back?” thunders Signor Baldo...

Well, Brexit did happen in the end, contrary to my son’s prediction of a Thirty Years’ War, and we toasted the news with vodka.  I spent the following week recovering and reading up on the history of that magic potion, learning much about it I had not known.  No Russian I’ve ever met, for instance, would tell you that the word itself, “vodka,” is scarcely more than a hundred years old.  Instead, for many centuries, and well into the nineteenth, the term “bread wine,” or simply “wine,” was generally used to describe forty-proof alcohol made from grain. Strangely enough, when...

Winter has been even milder than usual here, and I would be happy to hail global warming were it not for the inconvenient fact that over the last 40 years average world surface temperatures have not changed, while during the 40 years before that, from 1946 to 1975, they actually fell, by one-tenth of one degree Centigrade to be precise.