Here we go gathering nuts in May. And there are plenty of them out there. Take your pick. But there remains the same old problem – how to wrest the stories out of the rocks? The temperature drops, the gale tears at the fresh leaves of this late spring – or is it early summer – the seemingly endless winter still fresh in our minds. Doubt tears at our fresh minds forever fresh from the deep freeze cabinet. Bewildered by the loss of endless credit and madcap shopping, nowhere to go for a guarantee of some sun, some sort of warmth because the climate’s all to pot. And then you say business as usual as you escape on a train somewhere up north I guess though it is not entirely clear where exactly you are heading. However there is little doubt that you have been nabbed by the security services. On the other hand there is a doubt about which side you might be on: have you been taken, rendered and subjected to torture in some foreign bunker where sadists are allowed free reign or are you merely helping some old friends out with information. Can you tell the difference?
Shall we go out for a pizza?
I dreamed this morning of Rome – I was having to pack up and there was far more stuff, piles of books that I had forgotten about, but I only had a small carry-on bag – leaving Rome again. In March when I was last in Rome and we visited a restaurant in Testaccio and then walked to Testaccio Bridge and across, aware of the river side path below and remembering walking along it a few years ago. Even then it had a feel of a liminal sort of place – edging to wasteland, liable to flood, home to who knows who – not really part of the city. In the Guardian this morning (Thursday 9 May) was an article about a photographer, a paparazzo, Daniele Lo Presti, who was murdered under the very same bridge towards the end of February. Who had he upset? This was the question Tobias Jones, the writer of the article, was addressing. Was the shiver I felt on reading about this murder more excitement or more fear. Perhaps, rather it was mere proximity. One knows that murders occur but it is far preferable if there are hundreds of miles between oneself and this appalling act. A professional hit, Jones thinks. He saw something he shouldn’t have back in Calabria or perhaps about a woman he should not have been seen with? and he mentions the ‘Ndrangheta – this tantalising word that remains locked in Calabrian dialect – though their reach may now extend globally.
Two or three weeks is as close as I wish to be, just as the armed robbery in the supermercato (a few hundred metres from Basilica di San Paolo) in which I stood very still and certainly did not look at those two kids in their motorcycle helmets with their gun and their knife, was way too close.
The message from the gods was generally, don’t mess with the people in power because that’s just the problem: they have the power.