Hi Everyone
When you are approaching middle age, you find that sometimes you just sit in a comfortable chair doing absolutely nothing, and despite your best intentions, you realise that there is almost nothing you can do to change anything in this crazy world. This week, whilst almost in a vegetative state, I thought of Italy. Firstly because we have enjoyed eleven wonderful holidays there visiting many of the cities, lakes, mountains and coastline of this beautiful country with its almost unique mixture of culture, food, art and history. We feel very fortunate that we have memories of this wonderful country together with the many other countries we have been able to visit with our family and friends, meeting many wonderful people along the way. We have nearly always travelled independently and I have enjoyed planning our holidays almost as much as the holiday itself. Now we are almost at the point where long distance travel is not possible anymore so the point of all this Rubbish is to say, do what you can while you can, follow your dreams and work your way through your bucket list. You know it makes sense.
In the late 1950s the Partners went on their first driving holiday to Europe for two weeks in France and Italy. As you would expect they fell in love with Italy. Now at that time most people particularly in this area had never eaten or even heard of Pizza and Pasta but the Senior Partner came back with a liking for "La Sanj" while the Junior Partner had discovered that favourite French liqueur "Grand Mariner". It was quite sometime later that we realised that the Senior Partner had been eating - it must have been cheap - lasagne and the Junior Partner had a taste for that expensive French liqueur Grand Marnier. No doubt the Italian waiter and the French barman who served them in the 1950s have passed the same story down to their children.
Of course, not all of Italy is art, sunshine and fine dining as they have a reputation for not being good at winning wars although we will forgive them for that. This week however the wonderful art of Michelangelo, Botticelli, Donatello and many others had inspired a young Italian artist who had stuck a banana to a canvas with a piece of Ducktape. It was apparently called Comedian, although personally, I did not find it at all funny although that is probably true of most modern comedians. Incredibly, this piece of 'art' was sold at Christie's in New York for £4.90M. It was bought by a Chinese crypto entrepreneur, you know one of those millionaires who have made a lot of money doing nothing much very useful while contributing very little to society. I just hope that he has not got a pet monkey otherwise the banana will not last long.
Just a thought :
If you want a holiday in Italy, don't be afraid to Rome around.
Keep calm and eat lasagna.
Gracias
Brian
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