Saint David

What about those Blues! (No, not Chelsea, Everton.) It’s the 119th minute –the last minute of extra time – and up steps Leighton Baines to take a free kick from outside the box. He curls it into the corner to take it to penalties. Dare I watch? (We don’t do well at penalty shoot-outs.) Then Phil hits the winner. A great team – and manager - performance against the west London billionaires who (a) are the FA Cup holders; (b) spent over £70 million on players last month; and (c), haven’t lost a cup game in three years. I thought I wasn’t into triumphalism in football – but please allow me this one: I don’t often get the chance. (We find out later that manager David Moyes had already decided that, should the game go to penalties, he would put Phil Neville in as taker of the fifth penalty - because he was sure Tim Howard would save one, so the fifth would be the most crucial one and he knew Phil could handle it.)
Reading next, at Goodison Park on March 1 - St. David’s Day.

Lord of the Lies

We were walking in the street the other day when we saw a bunch of gendarmes arresting a kid. When I say “bunch”, I mean there were even more of them than the usual phalanx: roughly six or seven cops and one docile teenager, handcuffed behind his back. As we watched this rather one-sided encounter – which looked a bit like Manchester United versus the Dagenham Girl Pipers at Old Trafford with Howard Webb refereeing - up screeched a van-load of reinforcements. As the spectators on the pavement gave ironic cheers and someone suggested they send for the US Cavalry, one of the cops broke away from the crime scene and ran over to confront us, shouting, “We’re not cowboys!” and miming the drawing of a pistol. I took it to mean that he thought overwhelming numerical superiority was better than shooting first and asking questions afterwards.
Then last night I saw Lord Blair of Boughton on TV, labelled as "Consultant on Strategic Policing". Wasn’t he the Prime Minister who said he had been advised by the Lord Chancellor that he could legally start a war? No, that was another Blair – he hasn’t been ennobled just yet. This was the police commissioner in charge when that guy was shot by Met police on the Underground. OK, you mean the Blair who said that de Menezes had been warned before he was shot?
Perhaps the gendarme got it right after all.


Ricky Swannell has trouble with her vowels. She’s the woman who reports on the Australian Open Tennis every morning from “Milbourne”: “Fidera wan the furst sit sucks throy…”. She has no problem with the “the”.

Côte de Blues

Lest I ever give the impression that Nice is a city of perpetual sunshine, let me come clean and show our street a couple of weeks ago. (If you never see my blog again it will mean that the Tourism Police have figured out where I am and zapped my PC.) Today, I hasten to add, it’s not like that: we will soon take our walk along the Promenade des Anglais in our shirtsleeves and find a sunny terrace on which to have lunch. (I think that’s what they told me to say.)

Stop me if you’ve heard this, but, disregarding the occasional blizzard, Nice is nice. It is the birthplace and capital city of the French Riviera. For a few centuries BC it was a trading centre for Phoenician merchantmen, who called it Nikaïa, after the Greek god of victory. When the Romans crossed the Alps in the first century BC, they established a hilltop city here whose ruins can still be seen in what is now the elegant residential suburb of Cimiez. The streets of Roman Cimiez still bear the traces of chariot wheels, but they have hip names (is hip still hip?), like Duke Ellington Alley, Dizzy Gillespie Way and Miles Davis Street – for today it is the home of the Nice Jazz Festival.
Matisse lived next door, and I used to wonder if he moved away for those ten torrid days in July.

France’s – and the Riviera’s - love affair with jazz is as old as jazz itself. While paddle steamers were carrying the new music up the Mississippi to the great eastern cities, GIs on their belated way to World War I carried in their knapsacks the first scratchy products of the burgeoning recording industry. New French words were coined or adopted - "rag-time" became "le temps de chiffon", and swinguer and le big band entered French dictionaries.


I wasn’t there at the time - I’m a relative rookie who’s been attending the Nice Jazz Festival for a mere 29 years. These days we sometimes walk up to Cimiez: the DG likes its fin de siècle architecture but not its exclusivity. But as we pass the Roman ruins I swear I hear music coming from the ancient stones: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Charlie Mingus, Kenton…. Those were the days before Artistes’ Villages and neanderthal security guards: then, the musicians used to eat with the fans. My kids and I would sit and chat with the likes of Michel Petrucciani and Lionel Hampton. Now they and Satchmo are just statues; the rest are street names.


Divided loyalties: Everton played West Ham yesterday, the beleaguered team at the bottom of the table and in need of the points, and supported by one of our dearest friends. Whom do you support, knowing he was going all the way to Liverpool to support them? “Let the better team win”, I prayed, “so long as it’s not the Hammers”. God in his wisdom gave the right result – two-all.

In for a Penny

He was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885 and raised in Philadelphia. He moved to London in 1908, aged 23, where he lived for sixteen years, and in 1924, he and his English painter wife, Dorothy, moved to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera.

He was Ezra Loomis Pound, a leading figure in the modernist literature movement, who edited and promoted the work of many of his contemporaries: W.B.Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot… His astute but ruthless editing - and enthusiastic patronage - were key to the success of Eliot’s The Wasteland. In beautiful Rapallo, writing and producing plays and concerts, he became a much-loved but slightly nutty local character, even as an enemy alien during the Second Word War.

On May 3, 1945, two days before the end of the war in Europe, he was visited by two armed local ex-partisans, who, saying that the Americans had offered a reward of half a million lire for his capture, arrested him. On May 24, two weeks after Germany had surrendered unconditionally, Pound was taken, under heavy military police guard and handcuffed to a burly military policeman, to the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Centre near the village of Metato, a few miles north of Pisa. The word “Training” in its title is a euphemism: the DTC was a punishment camp. Ezra Pound had had no trial, he had been given access to a lawyer, but the lawyer failed to mention that he was working for the US Army. The instructions from Washington were concise: “Afford no preferential treatment” – and they were carried out to the letter. Pound’s “cell” was one of those reserved for the most dangerous criminals or those under sentence of death by execution. It was a six-feet-by-six wire cage with a concrete floor, open to the elements on all sides - an early rehearsal for Guantanamo Bay. He was the only civilian out of almost 4,000 military prisoners; he had no bed and was allowed no exercise or verbal communication; he was fully exposed to the Tuscan sun by day, and by night watched under floodlights.

Pound’s crime was that he had criticised his own government: not only that, but he had done so on Italian State Radio. The content of his talks, which were monitored by the FBI, was both anti-war and anti-Semitic, and the fact that he had agreed to talk solely on condition that each broadcast would be preceded by a statement that he would not say anything “contrary to his own conscience or his duties as an American citizen” was not taken in mitigation.

After more than two weeks under these harsh conditions, he finally cracked: “the raft broke and the waters came over me”, as he later wrote. He was taken to Washington to be tried for treason, the penalty for which was execution. Pound’s breakdown was probably a blessing, because psychiatrists decided he was mentally unfit to stand trial and he was transferred to a medical compound and given a bed, table and writing materials, and allowed exercise. Five months later, before being committed to a Washington insane asylum, he was allowed a visit from his wife and daughter. He languished there for the next twelve years, during which time he completed his famous Pisan Cantos.

He was released in 1958, following a vigorous campaign by his fellow-writers, including Eliot and Hemingway – who, in accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature, asked why Pound was still a prisoner. Pound returned to his beloved Rapallo, and later to Venice, where he died in 1972.

You might say that for speaking on a Fascist radio station, he should have been executed for treason. William (Lord Haw Haw) Joyce was. But try replacing Pound’s name with that of Gary McKinnon, the Asberger’s sufferer who hacked into the Pentagon computers from his bedroom just to see if he could; or that of Julian Assange, an Australian internet activist who thought Governments were too secretive. They and their ilk now face the self-righteous wrath of the land of the Free, but for what - eccentricity? During the same war, P. G. Wodehouse went to Berlin several times to speak on Fascist radio. He was knighted by the Queen.

Happy Return

Taxing times: 15.23 GMT today, to be precise. That’s when Her Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes acknowledged receipt of my Tax Return. I can now direct my creative talents elsewhere. So – good news – I won’t be spending my birthday in the Tower. Not only that, but he has promised me a substantial refund. Good news? Well, partly –because the HMIT, being more optimistic about my earning power than I was, had taxed me accordingly - in advance of course. In other words, he will be refunding a minuscule proportion of my own money. But at least the nightmare is all over until next January – made slightly more nightmarish than usual because my least favourite financial software vendor, Quicken, pulled the plug on my accounting package, and, since Microsoft already pulled the plug on theirs last year, I had to learn another one. So welcome to Bank Tree – a quarter the price of Quicken and much nicer people.

Now the bad news: according to the BBC, Everton’s Steven Pienaar is to join Tottenham for a fee of about £2.5m. Sorry, how much was that? “He's certainly not dear is he?" said Harry. I know Harry’s a pretty slick deal-maker, and I know midfielders come cheaper than strikers, even those who don’t strike very often and have earlier use-by dates, but 2.5million… Makes you wonder what ‘arry would have paid for Darren Bent – certainly not ten times that, as the former French teacher at my old school just did. But, like the HMIT and Bank Tree, much nicer people.

The Umpire Strikes Back

Liverpool lost their match against Manchester United last week. They were the worse team, agreed, but they should not have lost the match. They lost it through a dubious penalty awarded to the home team (the referee having been the only spectator bamboozled by an obvious Berbatov dive), and the fact that Liverpool had only had ten men for most of the game. The referee who awarded the dubious penalty and reduced Liverpool to ten men, causing their captain to be suspended for the next three games, was the man who refereed the World Cup Final, Howard Webb.
Nothing new there: Rule 20.5 in the referees’ handbook decrees that bigger teams must get more penalties than smaller teams, especially on their home grounds. (Liverpool have “won” more penalties that any other Premiership team: Everton have been awarded one penalty against Liverpool in the last 73 years. Wolves haven’t had a single one this season.) Liverpool drew 2-all at home to Everton yesterday - one of their goals was a penalty.
We know that Captain Webb is way down the list of a pretty dire bunch, but right now, let’s not get into whether he was justified – except that his body language at the time indicated what politicians call a “U-turn”. Let’s not even get into whether a referee who, simply because he was a native of a neutral country, once refereed a World Cup Final - handing out a record 14 yellow cards in the process - should suddenly become all-seeing if not saintly. Surely a medal from the Queen would suffice?
No, this is about a Liverpool player called Ryan Babel, who saw a Photoshop mock-up of aforementioned Webb wearing a Manchester United shirt, thought it funny, and tweeted it. He has been subjected to the full venom of blazerdom and will be summoned to Lancaster Gate, placed in stocks in Hyde Park and pelted with fruit by buffoons called Platter or Blatini. The club has yet to decide his punishment – they are waiting for the Blazers to tell them what it is.
This just in: Babel was fined £10,000 today. Blazers do not do humour.

Too many cooks...

The two-year blog sabbatical has passed: as, we hope, has the English winter – and so, I guess, have the loyal readers. I was tempted to post today on England’s decisive cricket victory, but everyone else is posting it, so I’ll just note a coincidence: my last post before the hiatus was about cricket and Alistair Cooke. So is this: in the final game of the recent Test Cricket series, the man of the match - and of the whole series - was Alistair Cook.


No turgid history of the last two years’ events, I promise – they were a great couple of years, but recounting them would resemble a Windows update: shut down when finished if not before. Briefly then, did some writing – articles, Memoir of my first 25 years, and Foreword to a new edition of Tobias Smollett’s (1766) Travels in France and Italy. Moved house to downtown Nice, (more about Nice later)had a stroke but recovered – thanks to TLC by the DG. We don’t have a panoramic sea view any more, but one more conducive to writing – a library. And started another book, this time Florence and Tuscany: A Literary Guide for Travellers – hence the photo of the Arno.
About to start the most creatively challenging activity of them all: the Tax Return, which has to be submitted by end January.

It's not Cricket

Bleary-eyed again this morning, but happy - my two bottles of Meursault are safe. The Sydney Telegraph front page of a couple of weeks ago carried a full page headline across a picture of Peter Siddle, the Aussie fast bowler, which read, in huge caps: “OUR POM DISPOSAL EXPERT”.

I love it when they do that – it seems to bring out the normally dormant jolly-old English fighting spirit. What does Henry V say? “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility – but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger…” Another Oz journo gem was the “controversial no-ball” that kept Cook in the game. Why “controversial” when 50 million people around the world saw Beer bowl a no-ball – replayed many times over? The same 50 million, plus 40,000 at the SCG, saw that ball hit the ground on its way to Hughes which he tried to claim as a catch. Alistair looked at him disdainfully but didn't move. When it was replayed on the big screen, 10,000 cheered - the Barmy Army. 30,000 were in silent contrition.
Siddle’s contribution: 1 wicket for 98 runs; runs scored: O
Cook's contribution; runs scored: 189.
Hope we finish it off tonight – I can’t stay awake much longer.
Once more unto the breach, once more...

Nice is nice

This is where we used to live - Villefranche-sur-Mer, but we don't live there any more. We decided we would like to try some city living.
Forgive the baggy eyes, but play starts in Sydney each morning at 11.30 am in the England v. Oz “Ashes” series, which is 11.30pm at night here – and I have wagered two bottles of Meursault on the result. (By an amazing coincidence, cricket and Alistair Cooke were the topics subjects of the previous post, two years ago – and England’s leading batsman in the present series is called Alistair Cook - strange?)
We now live five miles eastwards
along the coast, which is nice.
Every good wish for 2011.

Last Post

Neville Cardus – later Sir – was the greatest of cricket commentators and writers, and equally famous as a music critic. He worked in these two fields for most of his 87 years. In his soft west-country burr, Cardus would often correlate these two interests in his commentaries. (Of W. G. Grace: “He orchestrated the folk music of cricket”.) On retirement, he closed his final cricket commentary without a dramatic farewell. He said, as he always did, “I’m now handing over the commentary to…”

A fellow-writer with Cardus at the Manchester Guardian was a young Lancastrian named Alistair Cooke – later Honorary Sir - whose goodbye to broadcasting was equally unpretentious. In his 95th year, he closed the longest-running series in broadcasting history as he had done for the previous 58 years: he said, in his gentle mid-Atlantic voice, “Goodnight”. His 3,000 scripts, totalling some seven million words, will soon be available on-line.

As an admirer of both journalists, but with a mere three years of bloggery and only 117,717 words (including these) on the clock, you will appreciate that I would have to emulate their lack of sentimentality.

Last post by Riviera writer on Tuesday, January 06, 2009.

Chain mail

I just sent an e-mail to Mr P. at well-known publishers Archant. I got an automated reply saying “I’ll be out of the office until January 5. If the matter is urgent, please e-mail Mr S.” Deeming the matter reasonably urgent, I mailed Mr S. – and got an automated reply saying “I’ll be out of the office until January 5". Fortunately he did not say, "If the matter is urgent, please e-mail Mr P." or I'd still be at it next year.

Speaking of which, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish that loyal but diminishing band of readers a very happy, healthy and prosperous new year, and may your comments continue to be as creative, lively and penetrating – but conspicuously more numerous – in 2009 than in 2008.

BA Humbug

Just when I’d decided to retire from trying to be a consumer champion comes this credit-crunch-crushing offer from British Airways to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the One-World Alliance: reward, 10,000 BA miles!
All you have to do is this:
1. Fly First Class or Club long-haul.
2. Connect to another airline in the “Alliance”- American Airlines or one of nine others, including Finnair, Malév, Jordanian, LAN etc.
3. Complete the journey before December 19.
Not exactly an offer you can’t refuse – if you can afford to do all that, 10,000 BA miles (enough to take one person Economy Class to Glasgow) would be a highly resistible incentive. (You could buy them for £310.)

Enough of the caped crusading; I’ve decided to emulate the DG and move into Human Interest. So now, lest you get the impression that life on the Côte d’Azur is a bowl of cherries, a pip: we have new neighbours downstairs, who I hope read this. They have a three-year-old child. So did we, once, six times between us, and it’s a precious age. But these people are so precious about theirs that every movement we make causes them to ring – or shout – up to ask us to be quiet because the child is asleep. It must sleep 23 hours a day. They complained that our cane chairs scraped on our terrace, so we carpeted the terrace. They complain when we use the vacuum cleaner. They complain to our guests. Yesterday we returned from a long walk, changed into slippers – and within five minutes they rang to ask us to stop stamping.
We’ve been here eight years, and no other neighbour has ever complained. We spend only about six months of the year here, we read or write – neither very noisily – and play Scrabble, keeping score with felt-tip pens. We never have parties, rarely use the TV, and we tip-toe about the apartment in soft slippers.
So, having decided that we had compromised as far as we could, we called on them to ask if they could try to be a little more reasonable. (The child slept through the discussions.) Whether or not they appreciated our problems we don’t know – but they haven’t complained since.
If they do, we’re thinking of renting our apartment out to Michael Flatley for a while - as a rehearsal studio for River Dance.

American Excess

Dear American Express,
Your current advertising says that American Express cardholders “gain access to a more exclusive world”. I fear you may have carried exclusivity to a point of excess. I have spent many hours over recent weeks trying unsuccessfully to access my own account.
The problem is that when I click “My account” and key in my ID info, I am told it does not agree with your records. I obviously can’t see those records, but I know that my details have not changed in years.
I call “assistance” (from France), key in my card number as requested and a man immediately ask for my card number again, then goes through the security routine and says there is nothing wrong with the card and assures me that I will be able to log in. I go back to the beginning and go through this loop again. And again. And again. And I get locked out.
I can’t e-mail you because when I click “E-mail us” I get “Site unobtainable”. I can’t use Help or access FAQs because it requires my ID reference, which you say is wrong.
A nice man named Chris listens to my woes and tells me he’ll give me a temporary password that will get enable me to log in. It doesn’t. Back to the beginning and repeat. Again. And again. I am now locked out.
Can you possibly imagine how frustrating and time-consuming all this is? Since there seems to be no way of solving the problem, I suggest that you cancel this card and issue me with a new one.
Yours sincerely

It's not just Amex is it? Security is the "Health and Safety" of the internet - the one-size-fits-all excuse. In fact, angry as I still am, I'd say AmEx are one of the better ones.

Speaking of excess, a Mr John C. Thomason of Colorado has a letter in the current Riviera Reporter: “I love everything about the French, but…” [sound familiar?] “…why are you French people…” [this to an Anglo expat magazine] “…afraid of Moslems and Russians”?
Blah, blah, blah, then “One day you people will get the same as us and then what? Cry for help a third time?”
Editor: Every issue we get at least one letter from a nutter. You’re the winner this time.

The Write Stuff

What do you do when you discover that the book you’ve been working on for four years has just been published - by another writer who’d been researching it for twelve?

It seems writing is as much a test of character as of creativity. When John Stuart Mill decided that he was would never finish writing his history of the French Revolution, on hearing that Thomas Carlyle was working on a similar project, he generously gave Carlyle his entire collection of books on the subject – there were no lending libraries in those days.

So when Carlyle finished The French Revolution in 1835, he lent the one and only manuscript – there were no photocopiers either – to Mill to read. Mill’s housemaid, thinking it was scrap, burned it. What did Carlyle do? He sat down and wrote it again, and then – how's this for trust? – sent it to Mill to review. (Presumably he'd changed his housemaid by then.) It turned out to be Carlyle’s greatest work. Then he founded the London Library.

When Charles Dickens wanted to write a novel set against the background of the Revolution, he relied heavily on Carlyle’s book and reading list, which by then he was able to borrow from the Library.

It’s an interesting thought that if there’d been no Mill, Carlyle might not have written The French Revolution, without which there might not have been A Tale of Two Cities – and, worse, no London Library. Today, if you search the Library catalogue under “French Revolution” you get 575 responses.

The Victorian painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, faced a different test. When Lizzie Siddall, his model, lover and, later, wife, overdosed on laudanum, he was distraught. Before she was buried in Highgate cemetery, he touchingly laid the manuscript of an unpublished book of his poems in the coffin beside her, implying that “Without you my poems are worthless”. But when, some years later, Rosetti decided he would like to publish the poems, rather than write all them out again, he had Lizzie’s coffin exhumed, took out his poems and buried her again, remarking that she was still as beautiful as he remembered. As always, Dorothy Parker put it succinctly:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Buried all of his libretti,
Thought the matter over – then
Went and dug them up again.

What am I going to do about the book? I wish I knew.

Mafiaville

Palermo airport is called Falcone-Borsellino airport – for the two judges who were murdered by the mob there in 1992. Getting there at 1.00pm Monday for Alitalia’s 3.20pm flight to London seemed ample time. It was: the crews went on strike and I got home at midnight Tuesday. I won’t go as far as the guy who set up a special website to complain about his Alitalia experience, partly because the airport staff were incredibly helpful, but mainly because the guy is being sued by the airline. But next time I’m going by sea.
The amazing thing about Palermo is that whenever you think you’ve seen it all, another marvel pops up. The Piazza Pretoria is just one of many: a 16th century square – except it’s round – with a fountain in the middle, hidden around a corner from the Via Roma, surrounded by statues, which, instead of concealing their genitalia, Botticelli-like, with fluttering gauze or long hair, do it with their hands, like footballers facing a free kick. The square seems too small to hold so many statues together, until you try to photograph them - then you find it’s too big to fit into the viewfinder.
About five miles south of the city is a 12th century Benedictine abbey with a panoramic view across Palermo and its bay. It was founded by William II (William the Good), as a penance for the fact that his father, (appropriately, William the Bad), embezzled the country’s money on earthly pleasures. Williams I and II (pair Williams) are buried alongside each other in the abbey. Strolling the cloisters on a quiet autumn afternoon, you could imagine William II checking off his beads and meditating on his future image, eight centuries later. Just to make sure, he put old father William in a black sarcophagus. His own is white.

Lyon’s Corner House

We spent All Saints weekend in Lyon, France’s second city. It sits between the Rhone and Saône, and it’s where the two rivers converge. Fittingly, for the weekend of the dead, it rained almost non-stop. There’s a block of flats on a corner in Lyon, one side of which is flat, windowless and pretty boring. Or was, until a local art school decided to make it a monumental trompe l’oeil. A lot of people chipped in money for paints, ladders, etc. and this is the result. Even standing right in front of it it’s hard to tell if the windows, cats, cars etc. are real. They're not: only the delivery van and the pedestrian crossings out front are real.

The next weekend we were in Palermo, Sicily. It is one of those cities whose fictional image is so intense that it obscures its factual one. Oh yes, there’s still a Mafia presence all right, but the visitor doesn’t see it – unlike St. Petersburg, where the mobsters sit proudly in their smoky-windowed Mercedes as they speed along the pavements. What the tourist sees is what travel brochures call a "bustling" city that lies between a blue crescent-shaped bay and a concentric semi-circle of green mountains. There are baroque churches in dozens and almost as many medieval monasteries. The picture is a 12th century mosaic the size of a cricket pitch.
Its cathedral is a hodgepodge of architectural history, from Roman to Moorish to Norman to Baroque with a touch of Gothic – yet strangely harmonious.
We were a group of “mature students” who, almost 12 years ago, met in the semi-circular piazza in front of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and every year since then have deserted our patient partners to go off to some historic European city for a weekend of museums, galleries and food. The main difference this time was that – thanks to a strike of Alitalia air crews - the weekend became almost a week. One of us is still waiting for his suitcase.

Sarnies with Grandma

Mexicans call it La día de los Muertos; the French Toussaint, posh English All Saints', but as linguistic imperialism spreads, we will all soon call it "Hallowe’en". Not belonging in any of the above categories, as children we called it "Duck-Apple Night". I don’t know if that was a uniquely Liverpool thing - but it was an evening on which we did silly things with apples – floated them in basins of water or hung them from ceiling beams, and tried to eat them without the use of hands or implements. Apples being autumnal, I guess it was the Scouse Hallowe’en.

But no one does it like Mexicans. In Guanajuarto, in the central highlands, some 200 miles north-west of Mexico City, I was asked if I’d like to see the museum. “What museum?”, I asked. “Las Momias”, he said. It sounded friendly, but it turned out to be a ghoulish library, its shelves within easy touching distance on either side, except that on the shelves were, not books, but dead bodies.

There were men, women, and children; most of them naked, but some were partially clothed in funereal black. They were emaciated and covered in parchment-like skin that stretched across their bones like over-filled shopping bags. In eyeless faces, skin was drawn tightly across cheeks and jaw to reveal blackened teeth in demoniac grins.

I kept thinking that I must be more than half way in, so that I would see fewer of them if I kept going than if I turned back - but on and on went Las Momias - the Museum of the Mummies - room after room of corpses piled on corpses from floor to ceiling, most of them frozen into agonized positions that did not say “RIP”. By the time I reached "the smallest mummy in the world" - the petrified foetus of a woman who had died in labour - I'd seen enough.

It was my first taste of the Mexican fascination with death. In Mexico, La Día de los Muertos is a national festival, a day on which families load up picnic hampers and folding tables and chairs and trip merrily off to cemeteries to cavort among the ancestors, the adults drinking wine and beer and the children eating skull-shaped sweets.

Outside, kids in Nike trainers were offering coloured postcards of the bodies - lying on shelves, sprawled in the dusty street, or standing in line like a cadaverous Miss World contest. Other kids sold rock effigies of corpses.
That’s not 'rock', as in archaeology, but 'rock' as in Brighton.

Don’t Tampa with history

One thing about Villefranche is the strange signs they put up. Every pedestrian crossing has a sign saying "If you want to cross the street, press the red button below", and there's an arrow pointing down to the button - which is green.
Outside the Post Office, a notice says "Open Monday to Friday - except Thursday and Saturday". And in the middle of the town there's a building site. They're going to build 44 houses. The notice outside has been there a long time. It reads: "Completion date October 8, 2007". That's right, 200seven. The only problem is they haven't started work on it yet.

Tonight’s the night folks. This is the night the Phillies walk off with the World Series of baseball. You can't get odds on them not to. Why is it called the World Series when the teams all come from the same country? And it's not even an American game? You don’t have to go to Coopertown, NY to celebrate the alleged birth of baseball – in 1839. The rules of Base-Ball were established in England – in 1744. I like Tampa – nice weather, great Dali museum - but the Phillies will do it tonight, you'll see.
If you can stay awake long enough.

Senator wrecks Jazz Festival

That Chicago – it sure is one laid-back city. One of our reasons for choosing it was jazz. It was the first northern city to get into the blues – thanks to a river with a long name and lots of New Orleans jazzmen looking for work. Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven – that sort of thing.
“Hyde Park Jazz Festival!!” the brochure screamed, “Sunday from 11am till late”. Wow, this is it, we thought, pity we fly out to London that evening, and that it’s two buses and two train rides from the city and the same to get back. We’ll have to leave it at 1.30, but still, a couple of hours’ jazz before we leave will be fun – a lasting memory of Chicago.
At 11.30 there's no one there. At 12 noon some sound equipment turns up. At 12.30 some locals and a photographer arrive. There’s a problem: some nouveau-riche Hyde Park resident has his house surrounded by Secret Service men 24/7 and they can’t even walk their dogs, let alone drive. “God – if he gets elected it’ll be worse!” they say.
At 1 o’clock the stalls are opening – near-beer and pretzels. 1.30, still no jazz, and we have to leave.
Moral 1 – don’t believe tourist brochures
Moral 2 - Don’t go to a jazz festival near a presidential candidate’s home.


Chicago has two other famous sons: Ernest Hemingway, who spent his first 18 years in Oak Park, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who began his architectural career with the great Louis Sullivan, then started his own practice in Oak Park. In fact Oak Park really rocks, especially Louie’s Bar. (Has the number of Louis’s in this town anything to do with Satchmo?)
A week later, back in Villefranche, a letter arrives from Chicago: “I found this notebook in Oak Park, Illinois. Hope it finds you”.
Nice people, even if they can’t run jazz festivals.

Bread and Baroque

When someone says Turin you think of Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino and Juventus – the former familiarly known as Fiat and the latter as Juve. But it’s not all Fiat and Juve - after this weekend we’ll remember it as Baroquesville. Every public building and street seems to have been designed as part of some sort of Grand Plan – which of course they were. We went there because it was the only city within a thousand or so miles we hadn’t been to – and loved it. Neitzsche said, “This is the only place where I am possible”, which is about as helpful as what he said about Nice – “like a plant I grow in sunshine”.
Not a lot of sunshine in Turin – but they have the answer to Piedmontese weather: the streets are lined with cloister-like (but baroque of course), marble-clad arcades, and you can walk 18km. of the town - including intersections - without getting wet. It doesn’t help a lot against the wind but then neither does it seem to impact the sales of bread or ice-cream – or the warmth of the people. We'll be back when they play Everton - forza Blues!