The Napoleonica

Also known as Strada Vicentina but I’ve never heard it called that. Apparently Napolean’s troops opened it (but there seems to be little evidence to back this up). It’s a beautiful gravel (is that an oxymoron?) path that leads from the Obelisk in Opicina to the edge of the village of Prosecco, with the brieze-block like triangular church of Monte Grise looming over it from above, and the picturesque ports and beaches and passagiate of Miramare way down below. If there is a fabulous sunset, this is where you should see it.

And seeing the sunrise here sets you up for the working day. I walked along it recently in the dark with the moon shining.

It was also the final leg of our long day’s bike ride from Cividale del Friuli back to Opicina – a gruelling 80+ km, but most especially a final 20k+ of  the very steep ups and downs of the Carso through Slovenia. Joggers love it because it is a do-able 3.7 k in one direction and 3.5 (obviously) back and there is a gentle gradient that can push those calf muscles further. Rock climbers love it because at the Prosecco end there is a sheer rock face that amateurs and professionals (and kids) alike practice on all day long.

But I have always loved it because it is so easy and at the same time, exhilarating. Any time – in the freezing cold, with the famous Bora blowing, even in the rain.

The Big Bang Theory

..is, after Prosecco and Pizza perhaps the third best way to focus on the good things in life.

The TV comedy series I mean.

‘Third’ is just random, by the way, as in coming next in the list but not in order of importance, otherwise that would put ‘snuggling up with my man who just got back from Mexico’ fourth and thereby AFTER Prosecco, Pizza and The Big Bang, and  ‘reading The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of A Window and Disappeared would be relegated to fifth. I’d rather not put a value on these things. That will only cause all kinds of trouble.

I’m beginning to sound rather like Sheldon, aren’t I?

(I wish.)

Maybe I should reduce the viewings…

Ode to Prosecco

There is nothing better to make you focus on the good things in life…Salute!

…followed a close second by TV dinners consisting of home-assembled pick-and-mix pizza (meaning the cheap trick of buying the base already covered with sauce and mozarella and opening various jars and pots of toppings [be warned some of these will put you off, but there’s no accounting for chidren’s tastes…] …olives, sweetcorn, capers, sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts…) and slapping some prosciutto, cherry tomatoes, marinated anchovies on a waiting plate …my, why do simple lists of food always sound so PRO-fessional? Then it’s pick and mix. 

Maybe tomorrow if I’m feeling more philosophical I might ruminate on pick-and-mix as a way of being. Or I might focus on bubbles for the same reason. Or I might just get drunk…

 

Parallel Worlds

Really can’t tell you what a lifesaver writing here can be. Even when it’s just blah blah it seems to help me make sense of things and aways lifts my mood. Blog I have missed you!

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about parallel worlds. Most of us have faced some kind of personal tragedy or challenge in our lives which has forced us out of our coccoon – and there is a sense of surreality, a haze over everything we do, as though we’re outside in the cold, rubbing a misted up window, looking in. You can no longer remember what it feels like to be inside, where the log fire burns bright, and everything is cosy.

But disastrous events past, present and future, ALWAYS co-exist underneath and alongside any happiness.  I’m thinking of a friend’s adopted son who was brought up in Africa with loving parents until he was two, when his whole village was massacred. Somehow he was saved. Even if he didn’t witness the atrocities, he knows his own history. He has to live with that, no matter how happy he might be now.

As I walk up Via Coroneo in Trieste, I sometimes remember to look up to the high walls of the prison there. I try to imagine what is going on inside. I think it must be unbearable, and I wonder why I have the right to this life of walking along the road, and asking these kinds of questions. I think it wouldn’t take much for the coin to flip. I could go over and join them anytime. And not because I would have committed any crime. Just because I might find myself in there.

Hospitals are like that too. Other worlds of suffering that we wander in and out of.

I have never quite known how to work with this other world in times of happiness. It seems odd to ignore it.

 

Privacy and Intimacy

Today has been one of those days I’d write about in my old diary but not one I’ll be telling you about here.

I have stacks of old diaries, all, I think, jettisoned pages before the actual book was finished but still making a good stack of memories I look through every now and then. I’d be looking through them now if they weren’t all in storage, waiting for moving day.

One of them contains my thirteenth year, written on A4 sheets of lined paper, with those little sticky white polos over the holes, and set in an ugly green binder with ‘Keep Out’ naively written in biro in those odd round letters shaped like Baba Papas we used when we wanted to show off. I got a couple of Valentines cards that year, I think (or maybe one?) – anyway, they’re stuck in there dutifully too – the real identity of the senders still a secret and the subject of probably a third of the writing for the whole year. I remember too a much later one, also A4 size, but with a classy hand painted Florentine cover and gold edging, the one I used to take with me when I sat in Cafe’ San Marco here in Trieste, waiting to teach in the evenings.

Now, if I go out to write at all, it’s with my laptop.

But the crucial difference is I am writing not just to myself and possibly another carefully selected and vetted occasional reader, but to you, who might well be my best friend, but  could also be an unknown and anonymous reader. And while it always used to be the greatest outrage of any teenage girl (the gender assumption is probably accurate here) that someone would STEAL their diary and read it, today those same girls (here I am!) are looking for all kinds of ways to drive TRAFFIC to their innermost thoughts.

Downside is, if you really do have a public, you have to decide WHAT is okay to make public.

In other words, you can’t escape the real pain that is writing.

Anyway, this was just the usual digression to say that blogging poses some serious problems for the writer, dear reader. Because actually the things that readers find the most interesting are precisely the most intimate, the most secret, that should be – must be – written, but safeguarded symbolically with a little silver lock on a chain.

Maybe that’s when it’s time to write a story…

If it ain’t broke…

I posted that last entry in this (my old) blog by accident. As a New Year’s Resolution I had decided to write a post every day and thought for that I should start a new blog (‘The Means To Make It’). I had been fiddling round with the wordpress themes, activating a new one every ten minutes and thinking, if anyone was actually reading the thing they’d be getting a bit dizzy.

And then I got a comment on THIS blog, even though the entry must have been up here for all of 2 minutes (Thanks Pete Moorhouse – special friend and amazing scuptor/educator). But now I’m back on this blog I feel so much more comfortable and am thinking ‘if it ain’t broke…’ So, the challenge here will be the same. Write every day for 365 days (although I won’t beat myself up if I don’t make it), beginning January 1st (if I manage to get tecchi, I’lll transfer the 5 other entries over to here). Mission is regularity and commitment over and above quality – though in the belief that the discipline of writing every day has its own blossoming repercussions – and style, quality, ideas and identity will eventually come through. So wish me luck and join the ride!

Photo and design – all Micky’s!

Fake Stone Wall

So today we went to our (or nearly our) flat that’s been in construction for the last 4 years approximately (very long story), although we only climbed on board just a year ago. On board seems to be an appropriate metaphor, since the whole complex is looking more and more like a cruise ship as time goes by….(in a good way, honestly). And the metaphor of a ship works well too to describe the slowness of time passing, with no sight of dry land. We had been expecting to move in October. Now it’s looking more like March. But it will definitely be worth it.

They’ve had to build a lot of external walls too, since the building is on a very steep slope. I was impressed by the method for making this fake stone wall – a few guys from across the border (could be Slovenia, more likely Croatia) employed in plastering, then drawing the shapes of the stones with what looked like a simple pizza cutter wheel, then colouring them individually with a paintbrush, and glazing them over. 

Welcome to Olimia!

Prepare to relax!

I basically put this photo here so I could catch up yet again – on missing the midnight deadline yesterday. Ho-hum. Not sure if it’s harder to write a blog-a-day when you’re on holiday and roaming around the countryside, or up to your neck in hot soothing mineral water, with your biological clock telling you that 10.30 is way too early to be getting up, or when you’re back at the grindstone, with someone else’s urgent deadlines to be met.

Well, only tomorrow left in holiday mode (sigh! – or as the Italians always say ‘sigh-sigh!’ pronounced like cig-cig – which reminds me of how I used to feel after smoking too much – nauseous but still desperately tempted by another one)…..so I’ll have an answer to that tricky question on Monday – (‘Is it harder to blog while working or while on holiday?’)

I digress…

Later today I’ll put in another installment….

On a Roll

Hah! This daily blogging thing is easy peasy. Nah nah. Who cares if the content is entirely meaningless and my total number of viewers to date is 3?

Today I discovered why people go to spas. Yesterday, I was not so convinced. We had gone to a place called Terme Čatež, 14km from the little village (Pišece) we’re staying in eastern Slovenia. Just a big swimming pool really – with a few good water slides, but nothing better than the local swimming pool at the Oasis Centre in Bedford (UK). It all felt a bit Butlins (c.1970s) or Centre Parcs (c.1990s). Not always my idea of fun – or relaxation. I would call it the wow? factor.

But the spa centre we went to today a little further afield at Olimia had the wow! factor as soon as you walked in. You immediately feel pampered, wandering from steam room, to outdoor hot pool, to indoor ice pool, to sauna, to water bed in your freshly laundered dressing gown. And despite the stylish decor (renaissance boudoir meets 70s lounge) nobody tells you what to do or how to do it. Whereas in Italy or England this would lead to instant anarchy, here in Slovenia it leads to nothing more serious than some over-zealous petting in the darker areas of the pools (everyone is naked). Only other downside (though the latter was definitely an upside if you’re a couple) is you don’t have a clue what is going on for the first hour or so. From not realising that the kiosk feature stuck in the middle of an empty lounge is actually THE changing room, to understanding too late that the hosepipe attached to the side of the stone armchair you have just placed your naked butt down on in the very steamy steam room is there for a very good reason…

But the upside is you can do all these adult behaviour kind of things that you’re not used to doing anymore, while the kids flap around mad with joy in the swimming pool, riding fast water currents, listening to music underwater, playing on pirate ships and sitting in dark caves (ignoring, you hope, the heavily petting teenagers who have not yet graduated to the hot tubs upstairs). It is only when these two worlds meet (adults blissed out from hours in the sauna, and kids hyped up from hours sliding down chutes) that you are made aware of the extraordinary different energies involved in being an adult and being a child. Which is what happened when we invited the kids to sneak in to the water bed room at a quiet point in the day when no one was looking. As I lay back and felt truly and gratefully supported by the odd firmness of the water beneath me, my youngest began a rendition of Greased Lightening (you know, standing on the waterbed, arm outstretched, following an imaginary moving car, knees bent, pelvis thrusting forward and back..). It was time to go back to the hotel (happily well removed from the complex, allowing us to practice our Everly Brothers harmonies all the way back).

Scraping in before midnight

So of course the idea is to write something here everyday from now on…trouble is, this resolution has coincided with a hundred other resolutions I made, all of which had to be completed by midnight today…

What’s the point in the blog? Not entirely sure just yet. Main point is to write everyday (great! you say, that’s irrisistable, I’ll sign up straight away…). Second point is totally tied to the first – that in doing is becoming, in writing is thinking, in practice is perfect.

Belief: something good will come of it.

Next trick is to attach a random photograph and hope it wows you.

Here goes:

Seeing in the New Year at Molo Audace, Trieste

 

 

Hmmm…will sort out a better theme and photos and the whole caboosh tomorrow…but for now, I have done my duty. Wahay!!!