Yesterday evening I watched Paisa with my wife. We met in Bologna in 1980, which was when I last saw this film, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. I was hit by a double wave of nostalgia. The first was for an Italy which I hadn’t known directly, but the flavour of which I gleaned from early Rossellini and Fellini films such as Païsa and La Strada. The second wave was for the Italy we knew in the early 1980s, at the end of the ‘years of lead’.
When I got home yesterday there was a lovely surprise. A poetry magazine, Poetry Now, wants to publish one of my poems in an anthology. Cool. It will be my first ever published poem. I feel ridiculously happy about this.
Today was spent in back-to-back meetings, including lunchtime, and now I am dashing for the second parents-teachers’ meeting… I am very heavily concentrated on financial and administrative matters at the moment and I miss a little the policy content side that was so prevalent in my previous job, as one of the Directors for consultative work. Tomorrow, though, I am off to Paris for a meeting of the EESC’s ‘NAT’ Section, where the reform of the common agricultural policy will be discussed in the presence of Michel Barnier. Plenty of policy content there, then, and this will be the second time in three days that I’ll listen to Barnier…