'Jambone' and a quick stroll to Rome

I have returned! Veni, vidi, vici! (Or as some would have it, weeny, weedy weechy.) I should explain that a couple of weeks ago I walked from Siena to Rome, undertaking a journey that can only be described as epic in terms of length, beauty and of course quantity of pasta. I embarked with a mere 25 other peers all of whom were similarly school leavers with a good-nature, a very fine History teacher with an illustrious surname and good sense of humour, and our expert guide who was none other than my highly esteemed and adroit (if not only slightly eccentric) Italian teacher, who I shall refer to only as ‘our great leader’. We were led through miles of stunningly beautiful Tuscan countryside, the flora varying from acres of sunflowers to vast expanses of barely fields, to seemingly endless expanses of forest, whilst not forgetting the unforgiving canvas of thorns and undergrowth which made no hesitation to cause my shins to sting at every opportunity. We painfully climbed and gingerly descended mountains, crossed streams, stayed with monks and priests who have been carefully nurtured at the rich bosom of the Catholic church, drank from springs and once all that was done, we had the luxury of staying in some of the most quaint towns rural Tuscany and Viterbo had to offer.

It was in these charming places where to my joy (and my teacher's embarrassment) I at last had the opportunity to practice my rather scratchy Italian. I say this, not because I have great problems with getting my head around the grammar, or with picking up words and phrases, but instead because I have a knack for causing awkward embarrassments by insisting on using a word which simply does not exist. Most memorably when I was ordering a pecorino cheese 'panino' (yes, believe it or not it is a panino, not a panini. Make a note.) You see, each morning we would go out and buy ourselves a sandwich, the purpose of which was to serve as a modest lunch en route in the 46 degree sun. Unfortunately however near the beginning of the pilgrimage, as I shall refer to it, I could not quite remember what blasted ham was in Italian. I thought of the Spanish, jamon, the french, jambon, and decided that therefore the closest Italian equivalent would be 'jambone' (pronounced jam-bon-ay). It seemed like a perfectly plausible Italian word, and I thought that if I simultaneously pinched my fingers together and waved my arms about I would sound authentic enough. So, I sidled up to the counter and said smoothly and confidently:

"Vorrei un panino con jambone e pecorino per favore."

The woman at the counter, who I should add was of healthy, matronly proportions and a red physiognomy that had ripened in the summer sun did nothing but stare at me, with an expression that was between confusion and total horror. after the silence got too intense to bare, I decided to repeat myself, this time flapping my arms about more enthusiastically. Mid-sentence, however, she suddenly interrupted me and in a deep, rustic voice that seemed to resonate with a frequency as thick as the slices of cheese on display, bellowed:

"Ma ch'e jambone?!"

Putting emphasis on every syllable. Confronted by a voice that put my own fairly low range to shame, I quite weakly squeaked back:

"Jambone. Jambone! Ma vorrei jambone!!"

What ensued next all happenned in such a flurry; we began a verbal ping pong match of who could shout jambone louder, one in a tone of misunderstanding and frustration, the other in one of total confusion and cluelessness. I finally ended up thrusting my finger at the ham, at which she stopped yelling and instead laughed at me throatily and said:

"Ma questo e prosciutto!"

I let my arms fall to my sides pathetically. Of course. Bloody prosciutto. Trust the Italians to be different. Where the hell does that word come from?!

Other than my linguistic mishaps, other misfortunes befell. And I don't mean the uncanny number of hideous, raw blisters which everyone seemed to harbour. One evening, we were staying in some converted abbadia somewhere, and the girls in one room had unwittingly left the shower running in the bathroom. So as you can imagine, half way through dinner upon opening the doors we were forced to bear witness to a cascade of water flowing quite freely through the ceiling of one of the rooms. It was an accident and wasn't really anyones fault, and for once surprisingly not entirely mine, but I still wanted to drown myself in the mushroom soup from embarrassment. I suppose at least that death would have tasted good. 
...
What?
Anyway, and of course Rome was stunning; I need not elaborate. Except for the few minutes when my ears were forced to endure some Italian woman's terrible rendition of the Spice Girls' song 'Wannabe', my least favourite song of all time. Which naturally I knew all the lyrics to, and ended up singing to myself for the rest of the evening.

So many wonderful and funny things happened on this trip, and I would love to write them all for you, but I do not have enough time or space, and besides even if I tried, in the words of Dante: I could never give full account, for the telling would come short of fact.

PS. Hope everyone who did the walk has a great time at uni.
PPS. To all other readers, I would like to mention that I have since found out I got my Italian qualification. Yay. 

Parading around on a Sunday Morning

My goodness, it has been another few months since I wrote my last post. Silly how when I first started off I updated every other week, but now I can barely write a post a month. I am sorry readers. Exams are looming, and now I am on study leave I have more time to write an update, as well never having another school lesson again, which is in itself a bizarre thought. Overall I have really enjoyed my lessons at school, and do have a deep respect, fondness and appreciation for a few of my teachers, which I will probably maintain for the rest of my life. However, if there is one thing which has characterised me as anything but a good, frugal student, it has to be the way any punishments I receive seem to follow each other in a sort of Butterfly effect.

We have pretty bizarre Draconian punishments at my school; among which is what is affectionately known as a 'pink card'... which is funnily enough a piece of pink card (I now have a serious aversion to pink these days), and 'Sunday Morning Parade'. This is when the 'powers that be' or in reality a biscuit-munching teacher who serves the purpose of being in charge of all punishments (you know, one of those people who spend their entire lives gazing at subfuscous flasks full of chemicals and have the periodic table printed on their pyjamas), requires you to march around the town at an obscene hour on a Sunday morning picking up... litter. Lovely. So come Sunday, when there isn't even any litter left around, we busy ourselves trekking around the campus with essentially nothing to do. It just so happened that one week of an extraordinarily bad run in with three 'pink cards' which had already resulted in one 'Sunday Morning Charade', the library, in some paroxysm of schadenfreude, decided they were going to give me another one for not 'returning my books'. As if anyone even takes books out of libraries anymore, and when someone does, they have to ruin their weekend lie-in. The next time I saw the librarian I was tempted to drop an Oxford English Dictionary on her head.

On another matter, I haven't had a good old rant for sometime, so I think its time for me to re-ignite my complaining voice about one topic which has annoyed me at school: handshakes. Why is it that nowadays people cannot give a normal handshake? Although we could go on forever trying define what we mean by normal, in this case I take it to mean the good solid, firm handshake with a gentle swinging movement which has charactererised our noble, stuffy English culture, but it seems that my generation is incapable of doing a normal handshake. Have you ever just met someone, and they try to pull some palm-slapping switchy, twitchy, friggity hand-jive, which most people would need a special class to train for? And I don't really buy into this whole fist-knocking thing either. I've seen monkeys do this on a nature programme, and not only are we stuck in some anachronism in which we have failed to evolve out of this primitive behavior, we also seem to now have some co-ordination disfunctionality which renders us incapable of just holding someone's hand without finding the need to do some spastic finger snap. At the same time, for those of you who do take part in the humble handshake, if you are going to do it, please don't do limp handshakes as though you've just been treated with flunitrazepam. I suppose the reason I'm going on about all this is because I once did a tour for a prospective student and his mother, who gave me a handshake which was so pathetic it made her hand feel like a piece of dead lettuce.

I also had to explain to her the whole principle of what is called CCF at our school, something which is essentially when the students get the chance to play soldiers with guns, with the excuse of trying to ossify themselves for their later lives. However, some of the boys get a bit too attached to their army kit, going so far as to wear camouflage style trousers and tops in their spare time, with the excuse of that dumb urban-pseudo philosophy:

"Well, I, I wear 'em, cos on the streets, I'mma soldier yo!"

And what you do see them wearing is some acrimonious, bizarre 'designer' camo-trousers sporting the colours yellow and black. What the hell are you trying to blend into? A bee hive?! The worst is white and black... I call this, cow-mouflage.

Speaking of cows, I have had a few unfortunate run-ins with the local fauna at my school. Doing rowing as a sport I have to run down to the boat-house which is happily surrounded by fields of cows. However these silly animals seem to have taken a certain interest in me more than anyone, and I have found myself on numerous occasions running like a maniac away from a pile of inquisitive, charging, 2000 pound lumps of mooing cellulite. We also have a resident dog in my boarding house which, unlike the cows, has a definite hatred of me, and will try to subdue me by any means possible; including pinning me to the ground and barking directly into my face like a manic wolf on LSD.

Still despite all this I will always hold my teachers and merry school days in very high esteem. Who knows. Maybe when I'm a millionaire I'll donate money to the school to hire some bin men.

Listen to the album 'A Thousand Suns' by Linkin Park, as well as 'Fortunate Son' by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Time for an update

Wow. I can't believe my last post was before Christmas. I apologise. But I am also very glad to say that a lot has happened since then, so for this post I will be writing a gingerbread flavoured, chocolate-topped, cinnamon sprinkled, extra-fruity pineapple double foamy chopped-banana VENTI of a post. Firstly of course, lets not forget New Year's Resolutions. The promises which everyone makes so bravely and then generally break within 2 weeks. This year people have been very bold with their resolutions and I have been very impressed. Although when I was asked what mine were, all I could think of was "I will eat more celeriac and remember to feed the cat". I don't even have a cat. As for the celeriac... I still wouldn't touch it even if it were deep fried, dipped in yogurt, covered with strawberry gum drops and sculpted into something deeply resembling Michelangelo's David.
It seems like a very self-critical process. I mean, people's resolutions always seem to be about changing something they dislike about themselves, never "I will take better care of myself". I have always wondered if criminals ever use New Year's Resolutions in court. 
"Hey, I burnt down someone's house, but I have made a resolution to not do that again! So thats OK!"
But thats the way it always seems to go... you commit a crime, and then before you know it you've found God or some other sympathy attracting ideology like Buddhism, Pacifism, Christianity, Humanism, Vegetarianism....
Anyway, to me, New Year's Resolutions are just about as useful as a chocolate ice-cream teapot.


Near Valentine's Day its seems that everyone begin calling each other by increasingly strange and fluffy names. I don't have a problemo with dear, darling or sweetheart.... they are all very elegant and charmingly nostalgic. Its when people start calling me their little artichoke, or a cute pumpkin. In what possible way is being called a pumpkin in any sense a compliment!? Also, I don't understand why around this time family members start referring to each other by varying sizes of foodstuff. I once met a family who was insistent on calling each other 'Big Cheese' and 'Auntie Cheese', or 'Mummy Cheese'. What was their child supposed to be called?? Babybel?! Is the Italian cousin supposed to be called 'Signor Parmigiano'?!? I know that Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a lovely story, and I do love porridge both salty and sweet, but another thing is to put the family oat-eating fest into practice. No, I am a good fan of the old-fashioned Valentine's day of chivalry and romance, when you receive a big bunch of red roses and some chocolates which you stuff down so quickly you probably turn off your partner completely.


I also found out the verdict of the Americans. I should explain, that I had an interview for an American university, not that I was really intending to go there, but I thought I'd have a go. Anyway, I received a letter saying in a really flamboyant and long-winded fashion that I had been rejected. I t didn't really surprise me. At the beginning of the interview they asked me to describe myself; I told them that was for them to do. They then asked me to talk about my achievements, as though they didn't already have my CV right in front of them. Essentially, they asked me to big my self up and self-grandisize, in a very typical American way, something which is very un-English and I am not accustomed to doing. So, I told them, I had been given the medal of honor, received a knighthood, hosted my own cooking show, and that I can hold my breath for 30 seconds. That confused them. We then got onto what I thought would happen to Cuba when Castro dies; I told them that I though the USA would take over and turn it into Disneyland Havana. I don't think they liked that. Ah well, I was only really interested in the burgers and cheesecake across the Atlantic anyway.


Last weekend I went to Manchester with my quartet to take part in a music course that was being held there, playing a piece by Ravel. It turned out to be really good fun and a nice break from school. We were however, staying in a Premier Inn in what was probably the most dingy area of Manchester possible, and also I was on pretty much the top floor. Like the London Tube, elevators are one of those mysterious places where you are never sure what to say to your fellow companion. Which in my case, just happened to be none other that Manchester's finest, wholesale prostitute. Despite the fact that she was about 40, had hair the colour of a banana souffle and looked as though she has been high all day, she seemed like a perfectly nice person. Being one who is inclined to reserve all judgements, I politely said "Hello" to her. It didn't take long for her to realise that I was clearly not from the area, and so she asked me what I was doing here. I told her that I had come from school and had been doing Maurice Ravel all day, to which she replied;
"Ooooohhhhh!! So you go for tha French guys! You got tayste!!"
I didn't  know whether to be more surprised that she had recognised Ravel to be French, or that she had failed to recognise he has been dead for over a century.

Last week, we had the highly extravagant school concert which went very well, but left everyone exhausted. So when I finally got back to house after a hard day, I decided to go online shopping. As one does. And I was highly entertained by the fact that almost every store I entered had a clearance section, and every clearance section was FILLED with these things which some highly innovative people on the Apprentice decided to create: 'capelets'. They look kind of like ponchos but are not. Ah, the capelet! We had such high hopes for you as a fashion item! But now we have all learned An Important Lesson, namely, "We should not base our Winter line on anything recommended by the contestants on the Apprentice," and also, "Why would anyone actually need a capelet, anyway? This item of clothing makes no sense."

The Capelet: What You Wear When You Just Can't Commit To A Coat! What You Wear When your Shoulders Are Kind Of Chilly, But Not So Much Your Arms!

Anyway. I'm getting a little carried away with the capelets. But my shopping day culminated with the purchase of several items, most of which were for myself. Which is not necessarily the way Lent is supposed to work, but you know. A girl has to have something to wear. Anyway, along my adventure surfing the internet, I came across an amazing offer of a set of 21 domestic knives with a FREE knife sharpener for only £21.99! I was so tempted to buy it, but eventually decided against it, not knowing what I would do with them once I had them. Instead, I decided to do the moral thing and buy a goat for some random family in Africa.

So my shopping spree amounted up to the following:


Gifts Bought: 0
Items of clothing bought for self: 6
Goats Purchased: 1
Domestic Knives NOT purchased: 21, plus a FREE KNIFE SHARPENER
Pointless entries written, but, y'all, it's just so EASY with the movable type and the typing and the thing and then, WHAM, it's there, and I wanted to post something despite the fact that I don't have anything to say, really, and also, the phone keeps ringing and I lose my train of thought so I'm all, uh, people, GIVE ME A SECOND, but there it goes again, and I've forgotten where I was going with this, exactly: 1


Thanks everyone for over 200,000 reads to date!


Happy Belated Birthday to Pini and Cecily! (And mine tomorrow.... Beware the Ides of March!)