As I am taking a hiatus from an overdose of socialising I am reproducing excerpts from past Diaries.

It pains me to note that some of those mentioned in these Diaries have since passed away.

2 April 2006

From a friend in England: "Winter and the weather is warmer, the sun shines, sometimes, and the daffodils are coming out but it's been a long, dreary time since New Year and we had a couple of weeks with a biting east wind so that I had to make myself go out of the house, otherwise it would just all have been 'Old Lady Hermit Time.'"

"I am in the process of amending my will. I am writing into the will that I don't want to be resuscitated if the damage is great. I also want a cremation with loud music - Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries - organised. No eulogy and my ashes scattered in the Churchyard at Stedham, not for the religious content but because it's quiet and lovely.

"My current project sees me at a geriatric Craft Club! I'd hoped to learn a new skill - pottery perhaps? - but I find myself knitting yellow wool chickens for Easter.

The classes are boring and the tutor, who knows less about craft than I do, speaks to us all as if we have learning difficulties and are deaf. Today was so boring that I called in at the Four Chestnuts pub on the way home for a reviving J&B and coke. The whole experience has made me determined to avoid any sort of residential care. Fingers crossed I go out before I need do that. At least I won't get a priest but I might suffer a female vicar with trendy ideas and dangly earrings... Dawn French, heaven help."

I have, on and off, received emails about Private Investigation Agencies. It seems to me there are good private investigators who take your money and do the work conscientiously. But there are others who make easy money from decent, hardworking people who have problems in their lives and in desperation turn to private investigators.

One email which stands out came from a male who told me that he had very good reason to suspect that his wife was being unfaithful. His business was going through a bad patch and he admits that perhaps, he was not giving her enough attention. He paid Lm400 to a chap who had advertised his services in a newspaper and after discussing the problem awaited results.

Some time passed and the so called private investigator came back to his client and informed him that he need not worry. He had followed his wife for several weeks and she wasn't involved with any males.

Our harassed businessman breathed a sigh of relief and blessed the Lm400 he had parted with. At least his mind was now at rest and he could get on with life and its ups and downs.

Within two months of this positive report his wife, one evening, blurted out that she wanted a separation as she had been seeing someone else for two years and wished to go and live with him. Naturally, our businessman could not believe his ears. How was it possible, he asked himself, that the handsomely paid Private Investigator had not seen a single sign of an affair which had been going on for two years. When confronted the PI kept on insisting that he had never come across the third party. The businessman kissed his money goodbye.  Why didn't he follow it up? He said he was too sad and and too tired.  And anyway he did not feel like laying his life and unhappiness bare for public gloating or spend years in court.  But he did want to warn as many as possible to be careful about parting with their money and to look closely at the credentials of private investigation agencies. And thereby ends a cautionary tale.

And thereby  ends a cautionary tale.

16 April 2006

"Travellers without exception," wrote Stendhal in 1824, "are wont to confine their descriptions of Italy to the realm of the inanimate; their portraits only concern the monuments, the sites, the sublime manifestations of nature in that happy land..."

Those of us who have been to Italy, even just once, are in love with it. We are overawed by the great historical cities, Rome, Venice, Florence and by the stunning countryside of Tuscany and Umbria. But there is also an animate Italy, and here, thanks to television and the fact that most of us can speak some kind of Italian, we are able to understand it better than most.

And who has not watched with varying interest the Italian elections? I made it my business to zapp away, a little everyday. "It was television which ended the era of piety and began the era of hedonism..." grumbled Pierre Paolo Pasolini, the cineaste, even if Pasolini and piety are unlikely bedfellows. But good, bad or mediocre television is here to stay. It is thanks to television that we could follow the Italian elections, step by step, on almost all the stations, and not just Berlusconi's, in technicolour.

I love the way Berlusconi went to vote with his blonde Mammina, although he is a big, important boy now. Anything to do with nonna or mamma in Italy, whether it is a recipe or a ritual, implies family and therefore bontà. I noticed that Mammina Berlusconi, unlike so many of the blondes on her son's TV stations, does not have a heaving cleavage. And have you ever heard him quote his mother?: "As my mother once said to me - I'm a kind of wizard."

 To be close to a mother gives off an aura of goodness and Il Cavaliere knows this. How many TV stations does he control? Three? They help in a world which is becoming more and more visual.

Religion has always been used in the political arena, and not only in Malta. Prodi, who is contesting this election, is a practicing Catholic... which really means nothing, since some practicing Catholics, too, practice one thing in public and then do their own thing in private, where those who vote for them cannot see their actions.

Forget that every other Italian excuses wrong-doing because, they say, that political and church leaders are known to be up to much worse things, and a little tax-dodging or bribery for the lesser being in the street isn't that important; and that to a greater or lesser degree, everyone is up to something, and you're stupid if you aren't as well.

So, Berlusconi in spite of all that is said about him, no doubt, most of it true, has still managed to win the heart of almost half of the Italian electorate. Italy is based on aesthetics rather than ethics. (Malta is based on neither). Immortality is less frowned upon than inelegance. Fare una bella figura is essential; essential to create an attractive impression.

22 April 2007

Why do I do these things? My wardrobe is heaving with size 14 clothes, mostly bought at sales, here and abroad, in moments of euphoria, when I suddenly, and for no particular reason convince myself that I am a size 14, even if the mirrors totally disagree with me. I delude myself into thinking that given a month, I would be able to slip, yes slip, into these skirts, suits, trousers without using saftypins and having to hold my tummy in.

Well, I know why I do these things. I want my grandchild to have a slimmish nanna who can slip into a pair of jeans, take flights of stairs three by three (as she used to many Mango seasons ago) and to be able to wear her jackets buttoned up without dying of asphyxia. For the time being he cares not. He lives for his feeds - that is one thing we have in common. But soon he will care and will want me to go riding a bike with him in lycra shorts.

I like the vision of me riding a bike in lycra shorts. But these are only for the very slim.

And so the battle of the bulge continues.

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