I've been meaning to buy a smartphone for years and finally got myself a second hand iphone on e-bay when I was in the UK a few weeks ago.  Apart from anything else I was curious to see why so many owners seem to find them more interesting than real life.  I'm proud of the fact that it's second hand, it makes me feel less of a victim of consumerism knowing I picked it up at about a third of the price of a new one and without having to enter into a hire purchase agreement thinly disguised as a mobile 'phone contract. Four weeks later I'm attached to it like a baby to its mother's teet.  I use it for my shopping lists and I'm downloading an app a day to regulate my diet, provide me with a fitness programme and all manner of other useful things that I had no idea I couldn't do without.  I even take it running so it can tell me where I've been and how many calories I burned.  At night I go to bed with it playing me to sleep with BBC Radio 4. Now ...

Lying on the couch last night watching TV I was alarmed to see a figure flit across the terrace and rushed out to investigate to find Elisabet had popped round from next door to invite me to Mimingo's sixty second birthday party.  I had just eaten but thought "what the hell" I should be a good neighbour and look in. It was, as ever, an enjoyable and entirely undemanding evening.  I played hide and seek with the little ones, Domenica and Leandra, then sat down with the family and a few friends to eat and drink some home-made wine.  Mimingo's son Georgio showed me his growing collection of tatoos and everyone asked after Sue.  To be honest much of the animated conversation was in local dialect and entirely incomprehensible.  But I'm used to letting words wash over me and glean what meaning I can whilst nodding and smiling sagely. Erminia sat quietly on the sofa for most of the evening, preoccupied I suspect with the fierce pain in her arthritic hip, but ...

I visited our old friends Carole and Kevin in Nocera Umbra last weekend.  There must be hundreds of such hill towns in Italy that would not be out of place nestled in the background landscape of the Mona Lisa.  Their street plans are all similar, spiraling around a strategic hill like hunkered down snails, dark, introvert and defensive. This one got a nasty shake in an earthquake in 1997 and is still getting itself back together.  A massive renovation is now finally creeping towards completion and wandering round the pristine but largely empty streets the place seemed like a symbol for Italy as a whole.  There is so much beauty here and history mixed up with so much ugliness.  A lot of the town has been beautifully restored, but there is plenty of jerry building and incompetence as well, so that after fourteen years there is still no clear end in sight and only a fraction of the former inhabitants have moved back despite the injection of millions of euros of ...

A few days ago I was in the check in queue at Heathrow with Sue for a flight to Kuala Lumpur.  It was good to see so many Malaysians in all their different shapes, styles and sizes, from bald jowly Chinese taxi drivers to slim and elegant Malay ladies with their close fitting baju kabayas.  Also slightly unnerving to be waiting for a flight with an "MH" prefix after the mysterious disappearance of MH 370.  After half an hour of shuffling along I kissed Sue goodbye and left her to her journey, which will end in Miri in Borneo, where she has a year long contract with the British Council. Sue only had a couple of weeks notice of the job and so it has yet again been a rush to pack and organise our lives.  This time I will remain based in Europe, mainly so that we don't have the headache of getting our house out of mothballs on our return for the second time in as many years.  Last week was spent travelling between Uxbridge and Lincoln seeing our parents....

Dear Ellis, I'm writing this for you, in case years from now you type your name into a search engine, assuming that search engines and the internet are still around  and that the pages of this blog will have survived on a server somewhere. My name is Doug and I conducted the ceremony on 12th April 2014 when your mum and dad gave you your name.  It was my first ceremony.  That's me in the picture below holding my script for the service in the gardens of the Castello di Semivicoli while we were all waiting to go into the little chapel where the naming took place. Your mum asked me to conduct the service because she knew me and that I'd trained as a humanist celebrant.  Actually I've only trained to carry out funerals and yours was my first service of any sort.  I hope to go on to do lots more, but who knows.  Humanists don't believe in a god or an afterlife, but they do believe in humankind and that we are all responsible for living in harmony and mak...

It's mid-winter here in Puglia and life has settled into a quiet routine.  I'm teaching three days per week now in Ostuni and work is building up.  On my non-teaching days I'm continuing my desultory decluttering campaign, filling a bin liner most days with grimy unwanted junk, much of it coated in dust and hairs from our little dog Milly, who died three years ago.  With each sack dragged to the communal refuse bin, three hundred metres up the road, I feel a bit lighter. I feel like I'm lying fallow, hunkering down in our little stone house recharging my batteries for some new and as yet unspecified expedition into the outside world.  Sue is studying hard for her Masters and with not much money coming in we're leading a frugal lifestyle with our main outings being country walks and Friday trips to Locorotondo market.  It's been good to renew our relationship with the countryside around here, which after ten years still continues to grow on me.  Even in...

Living in Malaysia has taught us one major lesson - most of the junk you accumulate through life has no utility whatsoever and is not missed when you can't get at it.  We arrived in Sarawak with a suitcase each plus three air-freighted cardboard boxes and not once in two years did I think "oh, if only I'd packed that handy plastic ice cream tub crammed with old keys, badges, coins and fluff". As well as being glad to be back home in Puglia I also felt I'd returned to a mountain of dusty and useless junk.  Disposal has however been another matter.  Books have been the toughest challenge, nobody wants grimy and mildewed English language tomes in the South of Italy.  They're probably not wildly popular in Sutton come to think of it. Sue was all for sticking the lot on a big bonfire, but for me the connotations were just too strong and after a lot of aversion therapy I finally managed to train myself to throw them in the paper recycling container next to ...