Rescuing the Money After Lunch

'What should we do?'

'I'll pop down to the bank after I've finished writing this and put things into government bonds'.

'Is that like Italian National Savings?'

'More or less. There are different bonds. I'll have a think and do it in a moment. Let me finish this reference or it won't get there in time. Italy's not much exposed to all this; mixture of backwardness and extremely conservative banking.'

Main door bangs. Sigh of relief, the world isn't going to collapse in Monculi.

Later

'What lovely flowers, I always like green flowers'
'Still your birthday for a few more days.'

'What did the bank say?'

'Ah. Knew there was something else to do. I'll go after lunch.'

Obviously the world as we know it is collapsing slowly. ND said it would. It can wait till after lunch.

Art Dies in Monculi

Champagne with breakfast, a deep blue windless day, and a 350 page picture book on Giacomo Balla to marvel through. He generated a long and remarkably informed discussion yesterday on whether artistic creativity had died in the last 30 years - nothing like a birthday to fuel sweeping statements and the revelation of secret but long-held opinions.

So who, in any artistic field, (Chomsky no, as philosophy was ruled as not being an art in the senses intended) has produced work that changed the way we understand and savour art and our world? And did any such person generate a genre?

No-one, was my argument. No writer, no poet, no painter, no sculptor. Film-making was set aside for later consideration as our best film knowers were not there. Lots of names were named, but all their major work fell outside (before) the 30-year cut off.

Any offers?

ps Even composers fell outside the cut off; performers were ruled interpreters and not creators.

Avanti Popolo

The Festa del paese in honour of Our Lady is celebrated for two days in October. There is mass, and a procession with Our Lady carried shoulder high under a golden canopy (the 1960s practice of roping her onto the back of a Lambretta has, sadly, fallen into abeyance), and the massed clarinets and drums of the village band bray through the streets. There is free pasta, free wine, free goodness knows what after hours, and this year there is a particular frisson.

Thanks to the generous donation of the use of one of the house empty cantinas the Democratic Party will be offering free membership cards. I have no particular liking for the Democratic Party but the delegation that came to ask for the use of the cantina was wholly made up of the comrades: members from time immemorial of the Communist Party of Italy.
It would have been like refusing room to the Beefeaters. And I much prefer the Communist Party of Italy to their modern day successors anyway.

Tomatoes

The tide is not receding. While I was in Russia the guests and younger HGs stepped into the breach and boiled, skinned, cooked in oil and garlic, bottled and froze until their fingers were red raw.

Still they come. And with every panful comes glasses and glasses of fresh tomato juice. How lucky it was Russia; I have just the thing for too much tomato juice. It is quite reasonable, too, to start drinking it down first thing in the morning. So strengthening for a day's stakhanovite struggle with the riches of the Earth. Particularly as the apricots failed this year after hail knocked off all the blossom. It isn't good to keep opening the freezer,so every time I put tomatoes in, I take the vodka out. Energy saving.