Ian McMillan started it. He was on Desert Island Discs on Sunday, and he chose Stockhausen’s four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence as one of his tracks, though for obvious reasons they couldn’t play the whole thing on Radio 4. But it got me thinking. And listening. So all week, on and off, I’ve been tuning out and tuning in.
Yesterday I was at Westminster Abbey for the opening of The Field of Remembrance. Continue reading
When I joined this site I filled in all the boxes and followed the instructions, or so I thought, to the letter.
But it seems that all the time I was actually creating my own page.
So i have just posted a blog there. Don’t know if anyone will find it, but if any of you would care to look and let me know if you manage to locate it by leaving a comment, i’d be most grateful.
It then took me about another thirty minutes to work out how to post a blog here.
I am now completely exhausted and ready to lie down for half an hour with a damp tea-towel on my head.
Cigno didn’t seem the most obvious name for the hotel’s female tortoiseshell cat, but with a mixture of languages and mime, the proprietor explained she was called after the swan for her elegance and beauty.
The cat’s name wasn’t the only thing that surprised me about Sicily.
When I lived in France, I met several Sicilians and they were uniformly serious and dour. So I was unprepared for the smiling, friendly attitude of the locals. My efforts at speaking Italian were met with patience.
Encouraged, I persevered, dragging words and phrases from my memory, gradually piecing them together with a few bits oif French and Spanish like glue. My top moment was being congratulated for asking for a glass of house red wine in perfectly grammatical Italian.
Perhaps we were like the first swallows of spring. Heralds of tourists to come bringing our money to their businesses. Or maybe it was a tradition of welcome to the outsider.
Again, Italians from the mainland had told me what a closed society Sicily was. Neighbouring villages, they said, eyed each other with suspicion, and preferred to marry among themselves.
I had visions of inbreeding, low foreheads and lower intellects.
Instead, Rumanian girls who had arrived looking for work had married the local boys. Happy families of mixed nationalities displaying no anxiety or coldness about differing cultures.
So it was a shame and a shock to meet the only miserable Sicilian of the trip on the last day, just hours before we left. He opened up the monastery for us to visit, but seemed to have left his smile at home. He glowered, arms folded, as we looked about. Maybe he had a cold in the head, but as an advert for the loving nature of God and the Christian church, he left a lot to be desired.
