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 ...