We were invited to lunch by near and dear Italian friends. A treat was in store; the husband had made his own pesto. We nibbled on the aperitivi and chatted about this and that. Their daughter appeared. The water for the pasta was boiling. In a scene repeated millions of times a day throughout Italy, the husband asked ‘Buto la pasta?’ (Shall I start cooking the pasta?) ‘Si!’ we all cried, and off he went to the kitchen. A few seconds later he re-appeared, holding two half-empty boxes and with a thunder-struck look on his face. ‘There is no pasta!’ he cried. ‘Impossible!’ said his wife. The two searched high and low but it was true; they had run out of pasta. So unthinkable was this that neither had thought it a possibility! They improvised, by the way, and the pesto was delicious.

I promised N° 2 sprog that I would read every single book by Marcus Sidgwick if he did and I have to say that this is no great hardship. I have recently finished The Dark Flight Down and The Dark Horse and found both to be impressive pieces of work not least because, as I wrote in a previous post, Sidgwick creates convincing imaginary worlds and peoples them skilfully. I have also recently finished The Foreshadowing. Unlike the others, this story is set in the all-too-real world of the First World War but Sidgwick injects a touch of the paranormal and applies a trademark twist in the tail. All good stuff.

N° 2 sprog is a Jackie Chan fan, so this evening we watched The Forbidden Kingdom, a recent present. The film is great fun. Chan plays an immortal scholar, Lu Yan, whose elixir of life is wine. He drinks copious amounts of his elixir and is constantly drunk but, paradoxically, is surprisingly alert and agile. Notwithstanding his supposed immortality, he falls victim to a poisoned arrow. Only copious quantities of his elixir can save him. ‘We shall send a walking monk to fetch some,’ says the high priest of the temple where the dying Yan is lying. ‘Can you not send a running monk?’ gasps Yan. Great stuff. The film also stars two beautiful Chinese actresses, Liu Yifei and Li Bingbing. Watch this space.

One of the reasons that I have been busy is that one of my writing group friends, Lucy, was dying – she passed away precisely one week ago – and like all of her friends I tried to visit her in hospital as much as possible. She leaves a considerable legacy: not least two wonderful daughters and an extraordinary autobiographical manuscript about her bitter-sweet life as a Tomboy in the Australian outback. Another member of our group has now taken the ms in hand to make sure that, in due course, it gets published. Lucy had a very hard life. Indeed, you could say that her life was one long succession of misfortunes. But she was the toughest of tough cookies and through it all she never lost her sunny disposition. Over the summer I finally got around to reading a book she had warmly recommended to me: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. It is a wonderful book – possibly better than The Kite Runner– at once depressing and a testament to the fortitude of the human spirit and, above all, women in the face of adversity. Lucy was so determined that I should read it that she loaned me her copy. One passage, just one passage, was marked in the book and I can’t help but feel that Lucy wanted me to come across it. Whether she did or she didn’t, it sums her up perfectly, for Lucy was indeed: ‘A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.’

I know what you have been thinking; he has lost it! He can’t keep it up. He has gone the way of all amateur bloggers. He has shuffled off this virtual coil. But here I am, oh faithful reader (and because I have neglected you for so long there probably is only one faithful reader left). I shall atone for my sins – promise – by posting, in the usual way, a series of backdated articles. It’s just been a very busy time – in more senses than one.

It was time for farewells again, this lunchtime. Erika Reniers, a truly excellent official, was sent off in style by her many friends and colleagues. Retirement is a completely inappropriate term, since Erika is a very fit and active lady, but rules are rules and, sadly, go she must. I said a few heartfelt words. On these occasions I am always happy for the person who is heading off to pastures new. But I am also sad for the institution. Colleagues like Erika are gold dust and our administration will glitter a little less now that she has gone.

What had brought me over to London was lunch with Neil Kinnock. I wrote his biography and, though we see each other rarely, we have remained friends. It was good to catch up on things. For me, Neil is one of the great figures of the Labour Party and of British politics and British public life more generally. Admirably, he has remained a staunch loyalist and has contented himself with playing the role of a very private eminence grise. He adored his job at the British Council (he insisted on resigning when Glenys was appointed as Minister of European Affairs to avoid any possible accusations of conflicts of interest ). I hope he will not be lost to British public life because he has so much to give. That said, if you asked him what makes his life tick these days he would, I think, unhesitatingly reply ‘the grandchildren’.

No longer there...

I took an early Eurostar to London. My aunt, the sole surviving member of my mother’s family, was waiting for me at St Pancras. We took a bus to Islington and then she showed me around the area where my late mother and her family grew up. The house, in Duncan Street, has long since gone but many of my mother’s haunts – the church, the ice-cream parlour, the cinema, the music hall – are still there. I never did this tour with my mother. I didn’t think to do it. And now it’s too late. But my aunt has her own rich memories and so we strolled down and around this particular stretch of Memory Lane. Their lives were modest but the area has been well and truly gentrified now (the music hall is a Waterstone’s), and Vatican II did for the church interior my mother would have known. It was a somehow strange but deeply touching experience.

A little while ago (22 July) I wrote a post about Una O’Dwyer, whom I had regarded as a fixed part of the scenery in the European Commission’s Secretariat General, but who has, incredibly, retired. This evening I attended the farewell party of another landmark colleague, Joan Scott. When I first knew her she was the assistant to the then Secretary General of the European Commission, David Williamson. As such, she was an important backroom figure in innumerable European Council and other important meetings – and has a rich store of anecdotes as a result! She went on to head up the Bureau des Stages and from there went to the humanitarian aid office, ECHO. But now she, too, has retired. Of course, what’s happening is actually perfectly normal. Generations of officials are constantly retiring and making space for new generations. Like Paul Robeson’s Ol’ Man River, we jes keep rollin’, we keep on rollin’ along…. By the way, Joan, I Googled you for a picture. There was no picture to be found (you modest thing) but when I typed in ‘Joan Scott European Commission’ those mysterious algorithms threw up a nice picture of a tomato, hence the illustration. Have fun, Joan!

The writers’ group met this evening. I read out an exercise I had written up over the summer. The good thing about being older is, I suppose, that you have more memories…

The Po Plain

 We were travelling back up from Umbria today. There were traffic jams – there are always traffic jams – around Florence, and then we were scuttling across the vast expanses of the Po plain. It was hot, oppressively hot. Our car’s thermometer indicated 41° C. As the distinctively flat countryside shimmered outside I suddenly realised that, to almost the day, it must have been precisely thirty years since I travelled across that landscape in my first ever excursion ‘abroad’. How I came to take that decision is another story, but going ‘abroad’, going to Italy, was one of the most important, and one of the best, existential decisions of my life. And all of the memories of that first Continue reading