My grandmother – Nonna, as we say in Italian – was a very wise woman. But she was also headstrong at the same time as being generous. There is a lot that I learned from my Nonna, about life and relationships, but mostly about cooking. Now that she has passed, I look back at the [...]
I’ve never really enjoyed having birthdays, and I’ve got worse with age. A birthday, to me, is not dissimilar to a particularly irritating varicose vein.
My main reason for not being bothered is this: is the birth day that special? A day filled with pain, misery and blood (not to mention all kinds of weird [...]
Black and white films are classic, aren’t they? They should be celebrated, lauded, and re-enacted by the new generation of actors and actresses. Well, that’s supposed to be the way it is but if it really is so then how come nobody actually watches these staples of film-making anymore? Tragically, there are places all over [...]
I know very little about salesmen. The only lasting memory I have of ever seeing a door-to-door salesman in the flesh—a dying breed more than any other, but I hear word on the street that some still exist in the desolate waste-land of places like Manchester and Liverpool (Joke!)—are faint and skewered by the outraged [...]
Human-beings have this way of taking things that are perfectly alright and trying to make them better. Noticed? Like wheels. Personally I couldn’t see anything wrong with wooden wheels on wagons. They made you feel the road a bit more than, say, proper suspension–and possibly deadened any feeling below the waist–but there was nothing actually [...]
I’ve always, always hated it when I visit a web-site and it’s like a virtual morgue: sterile, unwelcoming, and generally unpleasant. The worst thing is when you wander over to the About Us page and there it is as you dared to hope wouldn’t be the case–a load of rubbish about how the company would [...]