An Apple a Day

Posted on July 8, 2024 by Francis

Azienda agricola da Cipolla, Via di Moriano (Quirico di Moriano): where we love to get our fresh fruit and veg:

Back in the Family

Posted on July 7, 2024 by Francis

What better place could we have been last night than at Giacomo Puccini’s family home for a concert to remember that it was a hundred years ago that he sadly died.

It is particularly poignant to remember that this was Giacomo’s last visit before he embarked on that fateful journey to the Bruxelles clinic to seek a cure for his throat cancer exacerbated by more than fifty years of smoking fifty a day.

The concert artistes all gave their best under the guidance of supreme Puccini opera producer Vivien Hewitt whose enthusiastic and elucidating presentations of the pieces sung gave us new insights into a composer who helped to transform opera into a higher (and maybe never to be surpassed) level of music drama.

Casa Puccini in Celle, a lovely little village in the val Pedogna, perhaps fills one more than any other place associated with this great composer and great lover of life with the feeling that ‘he is here’: Certainly the family home is so full of atmosphere, from the bed where Giacomo was born (its the original – the one in the Lucca house is a copy), to the ink blotched manuscripts where the composer penned his student sketches and set down themes for the greatest of his works to Edison’s present of a gramophone just to prove that the whole world could now listen to him

We feel so privileged to be a stone’s throw away from where the heart of Lucca’s musical treasury was born. It was an enchantment to be there ….and there too on the eve of our wedding anniversary… forty seven years so far!

Life in a Third (World) Country

Posted on July 3, 2024 by Francis

It needs a foreign press to tell Brexitania how it really is:

“There is mould in the walls and shit in the rivers, posh butter in the supermarkets has anti-theft tags stuck to it, the trains run on schedule about half the time, the average pub-poured pint of lager—the blood of the nation—is nearing the criminal price of 5 pounds and on May 22 a new general election was announced to the people of Great Britain by a prime minister who is richer than the king.

“Wage growth is at its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars.
Rent is about half a person’s average salary in London. Chain stores on British high streets close permanently at a rate of 14 per day, leaving most shopping areas a procession of corrugated shutters, uncollected rubbish and the sleeping bags of the homeless.

“The precious marvel that is the National Health Service is cracking at the seams; at the current rate, waiting lists will not be cleared for another 685 years. The union for junior doctors, the BMA, has organised 10 strikes and walkouts in the past year for a pay deal that would only bring wages up to the current level of inflation. The city of Birmingham was the first to tip over into bankruptcy; more will follow.

“In 2022, at least 3% of all families in Britain—around two million people—could not afford to eat. Like a revenant from Dickens, Victorian diseases like scurvy, rickets, and scabies are back to blight children.

“Life expectancy has dropped to the lowest level since 2010—tellingly, the year the Conservatives took power, at the height of the recession.”

“Midway through this downhill plummet, Britain bumbled backward out of the EU. The wreckage of this four-year disaster can now best be seen as an attempt to escape the harsh bite of austerity.

“Brexit was a retreat from hunger into myth: an embrace of antique fables about British pluck and derring-do, a belief that even without an empire and an industrial base this archipelago might reclaim past glory. Faced with profound turmoil, much of the nation turned to a half-remembered falsehood about their grandfather’s generation, marching along with Churchill. This election is the reckoning Brexit postponed”.