self indulgence

Watching the vote in the Senate has made me realise how much it matters that decent people, right or left, are running the government. I'd rather have any shade of political opinion than a criminal like the one we voted out at the last elections.

The trotskyite who voted us all back into a potential nightmare so he could say his part and turn round is as bad as any criminal; he got punched on the train home. I hope he got punched again tonight, even if we did win - just.

the relevance of Trollope

Since the Brownite attempt to oust the prime minister last year which led to that extraordinary farewell to the Party speech by Blair at the last full Labour conference, the government of the UK has become the stuff of novels.

Facing the electorate is the nightmare experience for any sitting MP; so much so that the rules governing the holding of an office of profit under the Crown were altered to preserve those accepting ministerial appointment from having to refight their seat. For most MPs an election is the bottom line to be evaded at all and any cost, but few considerations of post world war 2, the great watershed of the modern political settlement, politics, take this into account.

The steady advance of party grip on elected members has also been a feature of the advance of the Labour party and the decline of the Liberals during the last century; unlike the Conservatives and the Liberals, Labour requires its candidates to be members of an affiliated organisation - principally a trade union or the co-op, plus some others, or to have the specific nulla osta of the NEC where such formalized allegiance is lacking. Effectively Labour MPs are mandated in a way that those of other parties are not. The Party discipline of Labour and its constituent organisations and funders does not coincide with the single-member, geographically located, first past the post election system where, once elected, an MP at least notionally answers to and represents the interests of all , electors or no, within his constituency. Labour is much more like the notion of representation used in continental systems of party lists and proportional representation ,although it is forced to use the UK practice.

If the electorate are seen as spoilers and their consultation to be avoided at all costs then we are back to pre-Labour politics - Trollopeland. Blair, consummate politician and empathizer that he is,has got this in one; Brown, crude Party controller and unaware of non-rule bound nuance freak that he is, has not.

For the last six months Blair has been Prime Minister but without the encumbrance of the Labour party, except for the PLP desperate not to be exposed to an unnecessary general election. All Blair has to threaten is to call one if he is not allowed to run his full term; and Brown's levels of voter-put-off combined with his control of the Party delivering the leadership to him, reinforce Labour MPs' determination to support Blair in his anachronistic adventure.

what are you all reading and do you like it?

So here we are in Letsbeavenue; Desert Island books. I don't accept these nominations at all. Further, from this desert island, I sustain the whole -Library approach.

La Repubblica says:

125 autori del mondo anglosassone hanno scelto i libri più belli di tutti i tempi
Vince la letteratura dell'Ottocento, con Tolstoj. Poche citazioni per quella di oggi
Nella hit parade degli scrittori
Fra i primi venti solo il libro di un vivente: Cent'anni di solitudine

Classici battono contemporanei dieci a zero. O giù di lì. Non si tratta di calcio, bensì di letteratura: un sondaggio tra 125 scrittori americani, inglesi e australiani per scoprire quali sono i romanzi più belli di tutti i tempi, i dieci libri che ognuno dovrebbe portare con sé su un'isola deserta, o al limite anche su un'isola abitata, insomma i libri da non perdere. Ebbene, gli scrittori di oggi hanno scelto, quasi esclusivamente, scrittori di ieri, o anche di ieri l'altro.

La letteratura dell'Ottocento stravince questa speciale graduatoria, con gli scrittori russi che occupano in maggioranza le primissime posizioni e uno su tutti che risulta, per così dire, il campione del mondo: Lev Tolstoj, che con i suoi due capolavori "Anna Karenina" (primo posto) e "Guerra e pace" (terzo), conquista due delle prime tre piazze.

Segno che gli scrittori contemporanei non hanno una grande opinione dei libri che loro stessi scrivono? Il sospetto è legittimo. Martin Amis, Ian Mc Ewan e Salman Rushdie, per citare tre di quelli più stimati dalla critica e più premiati dalle vendite, hanno ricevuto appena un pugno di citazioni dai centoventicinque intervistati, che comprendevano gli stessi Amis, Mc Ewan, Rushdie, e tra gli altri Norman Mailer, Stephen King, Tom Wolfe.

Alle spalle di Tolstoj, in seconda posizione, si è classificato un altro grande classico dell'Ottocento, Flaubert, con "Madame Bovary". La lista dei primi dieci è completata, nell'ordine, da "Lolita" di Vladimir Nabokov, "Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn" di Mark Twain, "Amleto" di Shakespeare, "Il grande Gatsby" di Francis Scott Fitzgerald, "Alla ricerca del tempo perduto" di Marcel Proust, "I racconti" di Anton Checov e "Middlemarch" di George Eliot. Trai primi venti, c'è un solo scrittore vivente: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, con "Cent'anni di solitudine", il romanzo che ha fatto vincere allo scrittore colombiano il premio Nobel per la letteratura e che ha affermato nel mondo la narrativa latinoamericana.

I risultati del sondaggio diventeranno a loro volta un libro, intitolato "Top ten" (I primi dieci). Prima ancora di leggerlo, ognuno di noi può chiedersi se è d'accordo con la classifica compilata dagli scrittori e domandarsi quali sono i nostri personali "top ten", i dieci libri da non perdere, quelli che bisogna assolutamente aver letto. Chissà se anche i non addetti ai lavori preferirebbero i classici ai contemporanei.

salutations

A friend of Library subscribers (most welcome to become a subscriber) mentioned rereading favourite works as a goodbye, there being not enough time left to visit them all again and wishing to choose what to enjoy in one last read.

Last read nominations (for later in life, of course)?

dementia fears and reality

Sometimes, while flicking quickly through an attractive title, I realise only after settling down to a good read, that I have read the book before. Is my brain shrinking with the passing of time? When did this begin? How can I check it is happening and the rate of advance if I cannot remember in the first place?

Even more worryingly, very fine novels reveal aspects of themselves I had not noticed formerly (or had forgotten?).

Comments on re-reading experiences should be either condemnatory or, preferably, reassuring.

A-mazing (sorry)

I am going up the hill to consider mazes. It isn't necessary to have high hedges that block the view (though those feel more fun), and there is a large area past the threshing ground that could be used to lay one out. It is also waterlogged and I briefly considered a water maze. Looking in the Library, there is no water maze mentioned in the Maze book, but I cannot see why the dividing lines couldn't be water - like Mars, only still wet.

Suggestions are welcome but I warn Library subscribers that mazes are anorak heaven and conform to patterns and their rules uncontemplated in common life.

Shelved

Nominations are opened for the true trash book. I nominate Weapons of Choice World War 2.1, John Birmingham, which has only survived because this is the Trash Library. It is nearly 800 pages long; the writing is acceptable in that there are no errors so bad it is put aside; the form is narrative juxtaposed interludes with different protagonists from among the characters featured in each. It claims to be a thriller/science fiction, and it keeps just creeping along well enough to make the reader decide to give it another five minutes after lunch, and then waste an hour; a book constructed to be picked up in lacunae of the day. The construction, at a secondary level, is not quite skilled enough to not draw attention to itself, but it is interesting to look at construction techniques, so even that is passable. So it meets every criterion for trash I can think of and I've put it on the shelves.

Other criteria for trash? Other nominations?

dream river

The Sweep is running with water, it has waterfalls and pools and swirly rapids (on a very small scale); the rocks, and river bed pebbles have been washed clean of mud and undergrowth; there are islands, high banks with footholds, low- banked lengths with grassy borders. It is a childhood dream of a little river, a river from all the children's 'journey adventure' stories that people wish they had played and adventured along when they were small. There are long glades beside it, then ramparts of rock and fern and oak trees and, finally, olive groves before the house.

When I was a child the rivers in the Pennines, at Low Row and on the Fells were like this; there they are called 'burns'; here, in the pre- appennini, they are called ruscelli.

It hasn't snowed except briefly in the Pratomagno, and rained very little, so we must assume that the cleaning of the woodlands has released an acquifer to flow in its original bed; someone somewhere is missing a lot of water, I hope they don't come looking for it here.

frontispiece

The honour of choosing the photograph for the festschrift fell to me. Library users will be pleased to hear that apart from a knowing smile, the picture showed: the large kitchen fireplace, fire blazing, pietra serena distinguished, the table with tea things (pale green china with birds on), rather than the standard carpet of bottles, and a particularly fine glass tazza holding an artistic splash of colour in the form of oranges. Home life at its most civilized, even the cotto is highly polished. I am disappointed only in that, on checking, Gu is not in his place on the cammino.

Beni mobili and their use

It has begun already. I note, on checking the third floor shutters, that the chimera rug is in the stanzina, where it looks very well; the tables made from wood salvaged from the destroyed ponte S. Niccolo' have been restored by Marino and, when seen, will tug at the heartstrings of their former owner, and doubtless try to return to Florence but are destined for up the hill. Brass horse awaits his return to the fields of England (well, the gardens of WC1); though some things are at home - Berlin bronze snail continues to mark the rate of the advance of the revolution between Marx and Lenin in their bronzed, bearded seriousness, Franco's coffee pots and chicken alla diavola instruct the big kitchen, and the Chinese rug graces the salottino (I know few others like it but I chose it rather than the proffered fur coat and enjoy it enormously, as does Gu).

Furniture has always been a battleground in Tuscan inheritance, just look at all those vellum-bound volumes I to IV of XII in the Library, divided up dinner services, ill-matched chair groups, but if beni mobili join the Library then they can be borrowed and returned and a bain of Tuscan family life removed.

what is a collection?

What if all the pictures, prints, soprammobiles, rugs, (goodness) chairs... joined the books, films, dvds, (photos?) that can be drawn on, borrowed, enjoyed, returned, replaced with fresh choices? Librarians! Kings of the Universe!

Pimpa

A large box (really large) of Corriere dei Piccoli has held me up; reading again. Most are from the 70s and 80s but, wonderfully, some are from the 40s. The later ones smell of Chadlands attic the earlier of the stanzone vecchio, now so gloriously transformed for pool and snooker playing and watching Buffy from comfy cream sofas.

Rodari's true heir is Altan. The graphics in the later Corrieres are surprisingly quite as good as in the earlier ones, not least because of Pimpa and her creator. Both Altan and Rodari never descend into the saccharine or the fey; what they say has as much interpretive worth as the reader can offer.

Should some of the very best pages be framed and put on the walls (that Rodari exhibition has got to me clearly) or should the copies be preserved entire? A Library subscriber has been collecting Cipputi cartoons form Espresso for years and they could be framed too.

I think Cipputi is probably Pimpa's uncle.

Rodari at the Museo Marino Marini

The undercroft of the Museo Marino Marini is a scary place. To reach the exhibition we walked through the main display on the ground floor, then descended a dark stair to what we wanted to see. Slate floors, low-vaulted ceilings, discreetly dimmed lighting stretched away into the distance as we crossed a bridged archaeological remnant. I am glad I am a grown up, and even so felt like holding Giules' hand - and Giules is a grown up too. Low stone tunnels stretched off into darkness; I wondered if J.K.Rowling had been as inspired by this as Philip Pullman by the chapel of the Medici Ricardi. Conscientiously we turned to the first exhibit - some green groceries on a table top. As they had nothing to tell me I moved on to the next, the framed book covers of Il Romanzo di Cipollino (which put the veg. in context). Next to the covers, from many translations, was an extract from Rodari's account of writing it, which we read and moved to the next set of book covers. Surely there could have been people to read the Libro delle Filastrocche? Or recordings of smalls reading them? No, just the covers displaying a strong influence of socialist realism in art. We stepped up to Il Viaggio della Freccia Azzura, but no train that might be stepped into, not even a train set, just the covers. And a reprint of La Befana,come lei sa, a piazza Navona se ne sta...
Good thing we can read well, and are as tall as grown ups, because these displays are at our eye-level.

Arriving at the various editions of Gelsomino nel Paese dei Bugiardi where 'fatta la riforma del vocabulario, impose la legge che rendeva obbligatoria la bugia.' Blair, we said, turning to one another.

Favole al Telefono passed (I knew those BY HEART' remarked G., then Il Libro degli Errori, 'and made most of those' . I liked Rodari's view "Gli errori sono necessari, utili come pane e spesso anche belli: per esempio, la Torre di Pisa'.
We looked at the covers of Novelle Fatte a Macchina and remembered the word games, verbal tricks, hidden citations, inside out proverbs, recastings of commonplaces; good thing we remembered too, because there was nothing to tell those who had forgotten or never laughed out loud at all that inventiveness. There were no Marionette in Liberta', just the book covers under glass, high on the wall.

Una torta di cioccolato
grande come una citta'
che arrivi dallo spazio
a piccola velocita'
What would you do with such an image if you had curated this exhibition? No - more covers.

I particularly liked 'a Firenze, un professore d'etologia che invece d'osservare gli animali studia le abitudini del campanile di Giotto...', but the images were all in my mind.

I have never read Grammatica della Fantasia, 'Se avessimo anche una Fantastica, come una Logica, sarebbe scoperta l'arte di inventare.'. "Have you this?' we said, after turning into one of Florence's larger bookshops, pointing at the reproduction of the covers in the catalogue of the exhibition. 'No'.

It would be a welcome addition to the Library. And the Librarian can supply pots of poster paints and sheets of torn off computer paper, thus matching the provision for the 'Esercizi per la Fantasia' offered by the (highly funded) servizio educativo.

Imagine if Gianni Rodari had had a blog. What would he have called it? And imagine the comments that would have been posted; out of the mouths of babes...

Time's up

Very shortly the Library will receive a donation of German grammar books. I cannot believe I shall ever be able to tell the time in German. In truth, I cannot tell the time. I never could. I know the time in that I know almost to the 5 minutes what time it is through day and night (when awake) but this must be one of those sensory compensation mechanisms that are described in books. Blind people can hear remarkably well, or deaf people can interpret waving gestures and read mood from minute facial expressions etc.

Well, I don't think in 24 hour clocks, or in five minutes before the half hour time chunks. When I was aked if I had the time in Munich I showed the woman my (12 hour) watch and she read the time of day perfectly nicely in whatever goes on in her head and we got on well. If I need a timetable time I can look at it for long enough to work out that 15 is three and 17 is, treacherously five (for some reason 17 is particularly misleading, as is 20). All this has something to do with right and left too (or at least saying 'right' or 'left' and getting it correct to the outside world), I'm sure it has because the sensation of lostness and panic I experience is identical.

But if the cruelty and time-wasting doesn't stop soon I shall just go it alone, learn lots of words, present continuous, future and perfect tenses (with a few ad hoc imperfects), get up a specialized vocabulary on neue typographie and sail out on the bosom of Berlin urbanity.

treatise

Great excitement and hard work going on here. A book is being born in the Library! Final proofs are being read, infuriating editorial changes to complexly-cast sentences of infinite subtlety are being struck down (why do they do it? Library users of various disciplines have been reduced to quivering as months of work are annihilated by uncomprehending editorial intervention?).

And on Wednesday the last word on how to play the accompaniment of Italian music from the late 1500s to the late 18th century will set the presses rolling (well, modern technology given etc .).

pigeonsare vile

The sound of (light) gunfire took me to the windows overlooking the church square recently. There was the owner of the local grocery shop, crouched in the vicolo behind the house opposite, shooting pigeons as they failed to find footholds on ledges fitted with pigeon repelling wires. He remarked later to a household shopper that we needn't worry as he wouldn't hit the house. I thought 'couldn't hit a house' was an insult in shooting circles but clearly 'wouldn't hit a house' is a sign of skill.

The beastly pigeons make it across the our lady grotto and then drop dead in the garden; still, rather dead than alive I suppose.

There's a robust attitude to law observance in this part of the world. Some time ago there was an amnesty for undeclared arms (various) and on searching the building (ever-suspicious of the strain of individualistic behaviour that sleeps, and often wakes, here through the centuries) I found, 1 bayonet (used), 1 curved sword which I would call a scimitar (used, positively viciously-nicked from top to bottom of the blade), 4 duelling swords of various thicknesses (used but possibly only in sport, but who knows what the house inhabitants might define as sport?), a carabina case which, worryingly, had no carabina inside (where is it?), and an air gun (new, unused, thank goodness the grocer is doing the honours across the square).

So I put them all in a safe place except for the duelling swords which are looking decorative in a stanza del terazzo .

Once the arms had been declared to be in the house there was no requirement to hand them in; just so long as it's known they are there. I didn't declare the Landrover, even though its booklet describes it as ' tried, tested and approved by armies throughout the world'.

tortoise patrol

There is no sign of Lenin or Rosa but I have begun to patrol the lower garden just in case they wake in this patch of warm weather. What I shall do if I find them wandering about I'm not sure; force them back to bed? bury them again? It's bound to get cold before it gets to April.

Isn't it?

mimosa

Library members are arriving today so I went to the first floor to open the shutters and air and heat the rooms there. The profumatissimo calicanthus is beginning to fade now as February presses on, but the scented sea of brilliant yellow that is the mimosa from above is delicious. It has taken over most of the upper garden main bed; nothing else apart from the calicanthus, can grow there now. I wanted to take it out and replant it up the hill, but seeing it,no, experiencing it, in all its glory on a globally-warmed February day, I hesitate. It makes a lot of shade and is messy later in the year. Still, if it's this warm now ( early Jun-ish to give an idea) perhaps a shade-giving anything should be left ?

It does drop bits into the dinner later in the year.

night and fog

I have finished Derek Raymond's A State of Denmark. It is now in theLibrary. I was most surprised to see it was first published in 1970 because, apart from the lack of an internet, it describes some familiar scenarios. The better part of the novel is set in the countryside between Civitella Marittima and Roccastrada, just before the coastal plain in front of the Golfo di Follonica - familiar landscape to regular Library users as there is a branch of the Library on the coast. Life there is unchanged in many ways since always, so there is no anachronistic background.

The elected government of England (Scotland and Wales having unilaterally seceded from the Union) is called New Pace. Beginning with the steady marginalisation of parliament and the politicisation (perhaps partyfication would be a better word) of the civil service, and the out-sourcing of government to arms length party-appointed bodies, England is conceding democracy in return for no immigration, social order, and the retention of social and economic privilege by a fairly extensive middle and upper class; there is a much publicized 'working partnership' with the monarchy.

The hero has left what was then the UK on New Pace's election victory, taking everything he has with him after selling up in London and the country, because he despises and fears New Pace for what it will become.

I have been struck often by the early and mid 20th century echoes of nightmare propaganda and press control in the last ten years; as if there has been a style indulgence in a secretly admired regime, with the arogant assumption that the rest of us would not notice the similarities and derivations. I was shaken by the accuracy of Raymond's portrayal of social attitudes, political cowardice, deliberate eye-closing and his choice of words and phrases that come from today's comment pieces and ministerial announcements.

As he could not have been seeing into the future he must have been looking at the same past as that being drawn upon now for policy, practice, and imagery. The word 'new' has risen again as a marker for authoritarians, their achievements, and their goals.

Would the next visitor to the Library bring Resnais' film, on DVD, with them?

Among the greatest and surely the most beloved

Should different translations of the same work be shelved all together or in language sections? At the moment non-English works are on the third floor and, as the bulk of them are in Italian, though there is a respectable showing in French and Polish, shelved alphabetically regardless of language. I'm failing to spot the inconsistency in this but I feel there is one.

The sixth most translated Italian author, after Dante, Machiavelli, Gramsci, Pirandello and Croce is?

Gianni Rodari

"Se andrete a Firenze vedrete certamente...." la gente will want to see the wonderful exhibition Gianni Rodari nel Mondo:Edizioni Straniere di Rodari at the Museo Marino Marini in piazza San Pancrazio.

I will be in Florence next week and will go on Tuesday then report. You have until 31 March, every day 10-5, except Tuesdays and Sundays.

commonplace argument

While chatting to the Library's IT consultant I was struck by how commonplace argument has become a forum of falsity; not from the consultant's practice, but her account of an exchange over drinks with a person masquerading as a philosopher.

The object of any discussion, to determine what is being talked about, to clarify terms, and to formulate the stronger argument seems to have been abandoned; together with the common courtesy of assuming the other discussant(s) are able to discern non-declared aspects of the cut and thrust of argument.

Now any speaker in this new practice has an agenda, a narrative, to be driven home roughshod over logic, reason, clarity, honesty, hinterland knowledge, or acceptance of the aims or means of discussion (all this apart from both the openly aggressive and the implied rudeness in presentation).

Religion is like this - belief not enquiry, certainty not hypothesis, and the whole persona committed to victory not enlightenment. When this manner of conducting oneself in the world started up again I am unsure; but it will lead to such horrors, has done so already since it was last repelled over 60 years ago.

primitive accumulation

There are quite a lot of economic history books mixed into the Library, particularly the sections on the third floor.

I started reading again and find that an initial decision to class non-fiction as not-Trash, and shelve it separately, is doubtful.
Clearly Michael Crichton is trash and goes under 'C'. But where do I put Stanley Jevons? Or parts of Jevons' corpus at least.
What about the coal question? Jevons argued it would rise in price and then run out, plunging the UK economy into a crisis.
The 1980s couldn't have been a bitterer lesson in the role of technology in economic change and the importance of economic resources and primary products.

Just as Jevons was wrong so too might the political interpretations of current wars be horribly mistaken; perhaps it's not the oil specifically but straightforward primitive accumulation, as 19th century a concept as could be asked.

Again, all the scientific work on climate change, I am assured, points to global warming. But I really don't care for the political interpretations being made and the politics of reducing large swathes of populations to serfdom, albeit at quite a high consumption level, in the name of saving the planet.

languages

There are books in many languages to be dealt with (that sounds fiercer than I mean). So it follows there are speakers of many languages who have placed offerings (or confiscations) in the Trash Library.

Any member of the Library who wishes to comment in another language is most welcome to do so. Responses from the Librarian will be limited to comments in English, French, German, or Italian. But I'm sure all of you will pile in with anything else that comes to mind; just talk among yourselves.

Bemba speakers are requested to keep things fairly simple.

god

Tonight I shall finish Rankin's The naming of the dead. I find Rebus too much to bear, talk about Brookner's characters being gloomy, at least they don't give me a sympathetic pain in the chest and throat with the cigarettes, or cause me to worry about the drink consumption levels. Why isn't the man dead? Perhaps he will be soon, I'm at p 375. He might get Morse'd. Morgan Forster kills people off quite shockingly and now it's become the mode.

Next Dawkins on God awaits me. Or perhaps gods, but I'm bound to have something to say about that kind of thing. Prepare yourselves.

The priest has been very quiet today but I feel a bell outburst will occur at 7am tomorrow just to teach us all for laughing at rituals.

gardens and their making

The great cache of gardening books must find a home. If I shelve them separately then I must start a non-fiction section by subject, organized within by specialism; Dewey looms.

But are gardens only earth and plants and soil and water and sky? Can they too be imaginary worlds like novels, filled with familiar characters? Should I shelve Mazes with formal detective stories, or Seasonal Undertakings with sad, autumnal Anita Brookner novels, or slide rose pruning alongside A Summer Birdcage?

Attractive, indeed rational as it seems, I have decided retrieval must be the first criterion ; non-fiction shelves by subject with internal divisions. Those who have recently compiled indexes may have to come to the aid of the Library.

football violence

All football matches have been stopped until further notice in the whole of Italy. Last Thursday, a senior police officer was killed in Catania by rioting youths (minorenne) who put a bomb through the open window of his police car. Inside the stadium the usual mayhem (unarmed because of police vigilance) was taking place; the attack outside the ground seems to have been planned because of the efficiency with which 'fans' are processed into matches.

When a political aspirant to office names his political alliance 'Forza Italia' and, after years of some of the most corrupt governance - often openly criminal - Italy has ever known (which is saying quite a lot) on losing an election he had thought had been rigged for him to win threatens to 'descend into the piazza', then the regularly expressed belief that football is the modern version of hunters and forest guards and other armed but barely acceptable civil groupings is confirmed.

Prodi and Amato have reacted with astonishing speed, determination, and political nous to Berlusconi's at arms' length attempt to disrupt the civil order. We must expect more and worse as his March trial (and that of British Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell's estranged husband David Mills) nears.

Political violence comes in many guises; this time it wears football strip.

carnival

The whole village is being closed and I've just moved the landrover into the vicolo to look fierce in front of the garden gate.
The Committee turned up yesterday evening with the flags to hang from the windows (not enough, so I'll put them on the first floor). They're banners really, rather than flags I suppose, it's the same word in Italian.

It is really quite an ancient festivity; there are records from the 13th century of men dressing as women, women as men and swaggering about giving orders, free drink and vast pails of pasta being offered by the local landowners, cooked in vessels borrowed from the local madhouse.

Mad house it became after a few days of that; it got out of hand year after year - total licentiousness only supressed by the start of Lent. And sometimes Lent was not enough and soldiers had to be sent from Arezzo.

Eventually it was suppressed - more soldiers for little outbursts of carnivalism for a few years, but down it went around the late 1400s.

The Church was pleased as there was mock religiosity as well; the arrival of the king, inflammatory speeches about enjoyment and choice, then a mock funeral at his death with open coffin carried through the village and the revellers as the mourners.

Its revival has the local priest in a sulk, refusing to ring the bells (for which relief....) but some remarkably fine costumes; over 190 figures walk now, the women are men, and the men are women; there is free wine and pasta again too, though the mad house is no more. I could not say about the other carnival practices. All the figures are masked. And Lewes itself would be jealous of the burning of the king.

translation

After spending half the morning re-editing an English-language text that had been altered by a non-native English speaker, I was struck by the gulf that divides those of differing mother tongues; it is unbridgeable and the cause seems to be wholly different mindsets about how to communicate. I say this having no command of any language, but with the feeling that I have been 'at home' in English all my life.

At the most superficial level. German comes out authoritarian, French mysteriously ambivalent, Italian ornate yet often cruelly direct.

Many years ago a Library user was asked in Cambridge by a Nigerian colleague if Italian could cope with scientific terminology or simply imported the terms. That query has a much wider application.

Bump in the night

Veronica Berlusconi has publicly demanded apologies from Silvio for some heavy compliments he was offering to various women at an official dinner that were reported in the media. What an odd thing to do. After all these years she must have noticed he's mannerless; and why should her expectation of an apology be made public? The apology perhaps, as the offence was publicly given, but who would willingly publish the fact that they have been offended?

The photograph on the front of La Repubblica has clearly been taken on the western end of the terrace against the backdrop of the Comune tower; I thought I had heard noises in the night but it's better to stay in bed in this house and let the night denizens go about their business, not investigate.