Dining Alone

 To Rome, on business. Above is the view from the Deputy Mayor's office. Then the joy of the expense account stopover. I left the hotel I was staying in near the huge central railway station, Roma Termini, and had a wander around some back streets. I came across this trattoria. The walls were covered with framed photographs of the well-fed owner with a series of B list Italian slebs. Perfect.

 A smooth, fruit-laden Sangiovese from Tuscany accompanied a bottle of sparkling mineral water and some decent nosh.

I do so enjoy eating alone, especially in large cities away from home. It's the anonymity I think. The pleasure is, of course, doubled when you can claim it back on exes.

I surrender!

The Intrepid One was over with the twinkle-toed Jo. It was quite a demanding weekend.
There was a lot of this.
And quite a lot of this.
And even some of this.
However the climax of the weekend was undoubtedly a first-ever visit to a genuine Italian dance hall, a raid led of course by the evergreen Giulio the Singer and The Tigerwoman.
It was a remarkable experience that is difficult to encapsulate with mere words. It was as if we had all stepped back into an Italian equivalent of Butlin's from the mid-fifties.
Jo wowed the regulars and collected quite a few admirers. She only declined one invitation to dance from a local ("he smelled of pee"). Fortunately TIO had managed not to soil himself and so was allowed to give her a bit of a whirl too.

All photographs © TIO. Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers!

Angelo

After the rather hubristic tone of the last post I fully expect to be crossed off life's list with total liver failure sometime in the next six months. Talking of which, Angelo from the local village cashed his final pension cheque last week. His reason was more prosaic; he got too old. Tall bloke, lived with his sister in a half-completed slum right in the main square and rumour has it he slept in the corridor; well, let's hope so. Never married and all that. He was about 88 and fought with the partisans in the War and ended up in prison in Russia. He lived as a smallholder, selling veg (mainly asparagus) to local restaurants. I once gave him a load of persimmons from the Combo organic orchard and he paid me back with a bottle of his home made grappa. It was nothing whatsoever like the stuff in glass above. There were little black bits suspended in it and it tasted like brake fluid. Cheers Angelo!

Nearly there

Just one day to go, and to be quite frank I would relish another month off the sauce. I feel better, livelier, fresher and ready to do it all again. I have never slept so well.
All lies of course, I feel broken, dull and purposeless and can barely wait to uncork the first one. I spend most of my time trying to decide what to kick off with first. A Refosco? A Barbera d'Asti? A sodding big Plymouth Gin and Tonic? I could do worse than get one of these down at 7.30 tomorrow morning. It was a present from my extremely butch mountain-trekking mate Renato whose speciality is searching out protected plants in the Italian Alps, ripping them out of the ground, and stuffing them into a bottle that he then fills up with half-decent supermarket grappa. This particular plant is called Iva and is only found above 6,000ft (apparently). It is just ever-so-slightly flowery and very clean. Yum yum, pig's bum.

Boozing in Church

The choir in which I sing gave a concert at a local hilltop village the other night. Like trembling crack fiends, three of us hard core drinkers huddle in the apse, right behind the altar, as the local Mayor welcomes the choir and addresses the gently snoring audience with a lightning 45 minute speech. We hold our glasses out in gentle supplication as Emilio opens a bottle of his home-made grappa and dispenses what is known as the acqua del coro, the blessed choir water that warms the throat and braces the vocal chords. The suitably cobwebbed and crucifixed Romanish backdrop adds to the sense of delicious sin. And, of course, as an Anglican my sense of pleasure soars heavenwards.