Yesterday we went to Tindari in Eastern Sicily, famous for its statue of a black Madonna with a black baby Jesus.

The Black Madonna of Tindari prior to recent restoration

Like most of the “black Madonna” statues from places where the majority of the population is white, she is carved out of wood, and so was originally light-skinned. Wood darkens over time so, eventually, she became black. This transformation meant she was not just another Madonna statue but, rather, something rare, precious and the product of a miracle; and so pilgrims visited her from far and wide. Among them, in 1995, was Pope John Paul II.

The Black Madonna’s new church, completed in 1979

She dates from around 800 AD, according to a guide book I sneakily read beside a souvenir stand without actually buying it. We’re on an economy drive at the moment, as my husband reminds me every time I go within 50 feet of any establishment that sells anything whatsoever. It took me a while to figure out why he always offers to hold my handbag when I go to the toilet. He’s worried I’ll get distracted on the way.

She is carved from a rare type of cedar wood which comes from Turkey and the Middle East, according to the guide book I don’t have, and was brought to Sicily by sailors in the Byzantine era. Legend has it that the ship upon which she was being transported – where to, nobody knows – was driven into the bay of Tindari by a ferocious storm. The sailors dumped most of the cargo on the beach to make the ship more manoeuvrable, and set out again. Another storm blew up, more violent than the previous one, and drove them back onto the beach once more. They deposited the statue as well, the last thing they had on board, and set sail with their fingers crossed. This time they got away safely and floated off into the sunset.

Meanwhile the small number of Sicilian bumpkins who eked out a living in the remains of the once grand city of Tyndaris, founded by the Ancient Greeks, were most excited by what they found on their gorgeous strip of beach. She was already a centuries old antique, from a far off land, and she was black skinned with a black baby; yet she was clearly the Madonna with baby Jesus.

It was extremely dark so I had to fiddle with this photo a bit to make it lighter. Sorry, I am NOT an expert at these things!

The locals took her up to their tiny church on the top of the peak overlooking the bay of Tindari, and there they prayed to her. News spread of the miraculous way she had come to Tindari, and of her remarkable black skin, and pilgrims began arriving from distant places.

The Mediterranean was plagued by pirates in those days, and a gang of Algerian desperadoes under the command of a ruthless leader called Rais Dragut (or Turgut Reis) destroyed the original church in 1544, so a new one was built as soon as possible.

This bit of history made sense of a strange tourist souvenir on sale on the walk up to the sanctuary – a collection of pirates’ heads carved out of coconut shells, complete with bandanas and earrings. They were nestled among a forest of black plastic madonnas in various sizes, ranging from the 2 Euro pocket size all the way up to 30 Euro whoppers, beside mountains of rosary beads, and just in front of various black Madonna bumper stickers saying “My driver went all the way to the sanctuary of Tindari and all he bought me was this Black Madonna bumper sticker,” or something along those lines: I couldn’t read them properly as my husband was nervously pulling me away.

Turgut Reis: He doesn’t look much like a coconut, if I’m honest

Our Lady of Tindari now stands in a completely modern church, finished in 1979. It is decorated with mosaics and stained glass windows in fairly traditional style, yet the modern touches are obvious in all the details and, to me, this gives it rather a Disneyland feel. It is beautiful nevertheless, particularly the exterior.

The Madonna statue is displayed up on high above the altar, and beneath her is a Bible quotation in Latin, from the Song of Songs: “Nigra sum sed Formosa” – I am black but I am beautiful. I found a very interesting analysis of this book of the bible in a blog by a Brazilian priest and biblical scholar.

The interior walls of the church are entirely decorated with very fine mosaics depicting scenes from the life of the Madonna

Joseph with Jesus as a young boy. Statues and images of Joseph with the young Jesus are so common in Sicily that I think you see them more often than images of the Madonna and child. In a culture where fathers are so involved with their children and such active parents, it was inevitable that a church dedicated to the Madonna had to have at least one image of the father and son. The inscription above the statue says “Saint Joseph intervenes to help us”

This cute little carving of the last supper forms the base of the altar. It is made of marble and the figures are about the size of Barbie dolls.

The sanctuary viewed from down the hill

From the piazza in front of the church you can see marvellous views over the bay. When the sea level is low, the beach forms a strange shape which looks like the black Madonna and her child viewed side-on. Story has it that a pilgrim in early Medieval times, who had a small baby, refused to pray to the Madonna because she was black. When she left the church she slipped and dropped her baby, who slid right down to the beach but was saved from drowning by the strange strip of sand which rose up to save him, and the miracle restored her faith so she went back to the church to pray to the Madonna in thanks.

The sea was a little too high to see the profile of the Madonna properly

As we left the sanctuary I think my husband gave up a silent prayer of thanks that we had gone all round the sanctuary and the only money I spent was three euros on a little black Madonna as a gift for my mother in law, aka The Godmother.

Just 3 Euros!

In my previous post, I described our weekend visit to Tindari to see the Black Madonna. In compliance with my husband’s Great Economy Drive, a restaurant lunch was forbidden, so we had a picnic here:

“This is so romantic!” declared my son, who is 6 years old.

He took that photo of the sea (above), and then he took a photo of my husband and me:

Then my husband took a photo of me with our son:

I know as a wife and mother I am supposed to be encouraging to all members of the family, but when there is such a blatant discrepancy in talent, you have to face up to it. At this point, I confiscated the camera and gave it back to my son, who took these photos:

He was very interested in the various textures of the leaves and the patterns his shoes made in the sand, as well as the strong contrast between light and shade produced by the intense sunlight.

Finally, I took a picture of the little photographer:

So, who do you think has the most talent in the family?

Immigration is a hot topic in most developed countries. Apparently the Latino element in the USA turned out to vote for Obama in record numbers and are now asking for immigration policy reforms, to legitimise their not-so-legal relatives as formally recognised US residents. Olé!

Obama: lenient on immigration?

These people are mainly economic migrants, though. In Sicily, we get Africans fleeing for their lives. Sicily is exactly half way between Europe and Africa, so we are in the front line.

African refugees in Lampedusa, Sicily, in a detention centre

I went through the immigration process in Italy myself when I moved here eight years ago. I tried, in those early, naïve days, to point out to anyone who would listen that there is such a thing as the European Union and that I should have the automatic right to live in Italy just because I wanted to. That’s how it works for EU citizens entering the UK.

In return a uniformed, armed policeman at the immigration office informed me that being a European citizen merely gave me the automatic right to queue hop. He withdrew his weapon, and forced me to barge straight to the front of a long line of despondent and disappointed Africans, east Europeans and assorted Asians who looked as if they had already been waiting in this dismal immigration office, lined with peeling grey paint and posters of people being deported, for about five years. I was eaten up with guilt when I saw the sadness on their faces as they realised they would have to wait even longer, probably only to receive further disappointment anyway.

“Are you sure England’s in the European Union?” the policeman suddenly asked me after elbowing a Moroccan out of the way and physically manhandling me into the service booth in his place.

“Definitely,” I said. “We joined before Italy, actually.”

“But you don’t have the Euro,” he objected.

“And a good thing too, don’t you think?” I answered.

The policeman liked my comment so much he leaned into the booth and told the official to make sure my case was passed without any setbacks or faffing around.

“And don’t overdo the stapling either,” he added. “She’s English, so don’t waste her time.”

Italian officials love to string things out, so they not only keep foreign people waiting for inordinate amounts of time while they photocopy, rubber stamp and staple reams of paper, but they also send them on wild goose chases to obtain other documents from other public offices, despite knowing that the applicant will only be refused any immigration status at the end of the whole procedure anyway. This creates more public sector jobs for their friends and relatives. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

The Immigration Official glared over my shoulder at the Moroccan, who had tried to retake his rightful place at the head of the queue and was frogmarched away. He told me there were only three ways he could give me a ‘Permesso di Soggiorno’, or Permission of Stay Certificate. Either I had to be very rich, or I had to have a job in Sicily, or I had to marry a Sicilian.

“Exactly how rich?” I asked.

“Stinking,” would be a loose translation of his answer.

“Go on, try me. Give me a number,” I challenged him.

I had just sold my house in London so, as it turned out, I was that stinking rich. Both Hubby and the Immigration Official said declaring this level of wealth would be a terrible idea, because the government would spend the rest of my life trying to get every penny off me in the form of taxes I had never heard of. I went to that office about three times, to a couple of other ones a handful of times, and after a mere 4 months, I was legal.

What about the treatment of immigrants who come here not because they want to marry an Italian, but because they don’t want to die?

Refugees in Lampedusa. Their detention centre looks a little cramped, doesn’t it?

During the humanitarian crisis of the Libyan war, when Colonel Ghadaffi decided to kill all the sub-Saharan residents of Libya by using soldiers to physically propel them into the sea, Sicilian fishermen used to find groups of people swimming in the sea when they went out fishing at night.

What would you do if you were in a boat and saw the sea frothing with the waving arms of people struggling for their lives? Wouldn’t you pull them aboard and take them ashore?

That would mean you just assisted illegal immigrants in entering the country. That’s a crime.

A fishing boat in Lampedusa

And what if one of them was a pregnant woman who went into labour right in front of you on the beach? What you’re supposed to do is call the police, who will arrest these people and take them to a detention centre where they will sleep in a dormitory with about 100 other people until they can be deported back to Africa as soon as possible. Except you know that the detention centre is already housing three times the number of people it was built for, so they will actually end up sleeping on the ground out of doors, and there are not enough blankets or clothes for them and there is also not enough drinking water.

Would you take that pregnant woman home to your wife instead, so she could give birth in safety? Then you’d be a criminal.

This is what happened to an Ethiopian refugee from Libya called Timnit. She was raped by prison guards when she was illegally detained in Libya, and she gave birth to her baby in a fisherman’s house on the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa.

This is Timnit

Lampedusa has a population of 2,000 and their only source of income is tourism, which lasts two months in the summer. During these two months in 2011, 5,000 African refugees turned up from Libya. Every single one of them was fleeing for his or her life. Many of them died and their bodies still lie at the bottom of the sea.

The rest of Europe complains that Italy is a total pushover when it comes to illegal immigrants, or Clandestini, “The secret Ones” as they are more gently called in Italian. There are of course no border controls between countries of the European Union so, once one country has let immigrants or refugees in, they can go anywhere.

The Lampedusans pulled drowning Africans out of the sea whenever they could. They took blankets and every item of clothing they could spare, to give to the refugees. Almost no tourists went to Lampdeusa that year, which meant they lost their entire annual income.

The French decided to break EU law by closing their borders to trains from Italy. They sought and won EU approval for this. Then Berlusconi was attacked in Europe for his total lack of control or restriction over illegal immigration into the EU.

At this point Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, took it upon herself to visit Lampedua personally and tell the Lampedusans they must stop letting Africans into Europe. The Lampedusans declared in advance on TV that they would be polite to her, as they are to all visitors to their island, but if she dared say anything racist or offensive they would reply to her in no uncertain terms.

Le Pen

Meanwhile the Lampedusans were running out of water. Refugees were sleeping on the beaches because there was physically no more space to cram any more of them into the detention centres. They were turning the beaches into mass open toilets because there was no more water to operate the sewage system, and no water for them to wash. Those who could get out of the detention centres did so, because the smell of excrement was intolerable. On 27 March 2011, a total of 1,227 new refugees arrived in the space of 24 hours.

This was the point when the Lampedusans complained. Why wouldn’t the other European countries take more refugees? As many as possible had already been shipped to
Sicily and to the Italian mainland but the detention centres there were already filled three times over. If the other countries could spare planes and bombs to fight Ghadaffi’s soldiers, why couldn’t they save a few lives? Surely ALL countries had an equal moral responsibility to take some of them?

And what about America? That’s what I say. Europe already has twelve times the population density of the United states. If you want to know what that means, transport the entire population of the USA, all the cities and all the people, into Oklahoma. Once all of them are living there, that’s what it’s like in Europe. How on earth, I mean, HOW ON EARTH, can Americans claim they don’t have room for more refugees? How can they possibly complain about immigration? And please, don’t tell me there’s a money problem. America is richer than any European country. It’s the richest country in the world.

The Lampedusans were told they would receive no help at all, and the refugees were not welcome in the rest of Europe or the rest of the world. Italy must send them back.

Lampedusa

This was the breaking point for the Lampedusans. When you have no clean water, and the fish you need to live on over the winter are dying because the sea has turned into a sewer, you have no choice, do you? So they went down to the harbour and, when the next boat full of African refugees tried to pull into port, they stood there shouting “Please go away! We have no room for you here! You have to go somewhere else!”

And the boat sailed away.

A film called Terraferma was made in 2012 about Timnit and the other refugees who came to Sicily that year. Timnit herself acts in the film. The DVD with English subtitle is available from Amazon. I think that anyone who has ever complained about “too many immigrants” has a moral obligation to watch that film.

If you don’t, frankly, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

“I can’t wait for the leaves to turn red and golden and purple when Autumn comes” my little boy announced a few days ago.

No trace of purple yet…

“Er, they won’t go purple” I said.

“Yes they will,” he insisted. “We’re doing Autumn at school and we wrote a poem about the leaves going purple.”

Upon investigation of his school book, he admitted he had remembered the colours wrongly. The grapes are purple. The leaves go orange.

Of course the fundamental problem here was that he hadn’t actually seen autumn leaves. As my best friend in Sicily – who comes from the far north of Italy – pointed out recently, in a state of great irritation, Summer is brown in Sicily then as soon as Autumn comes along, everything goes green.

“Ir’s so, SO WRONG” we both agreed.

Some Autumn leaves, Sicilian style. You don’t even need drawing pins to stick them up in class – they have their own spikes in-built.

I got all excited a few weeks ago. It rained heavily and cooled off so much that I could actually wear my new cardigan for half the day. I dared to hope Autumn might actually have arrived. Then the sun came out, the rain dried up, about twenty million newborn mosquities flew out of the puddles, and Sicily was back to normal; stinking hot, itchy, and a little bit smelly in places.

We are all getting so fed up that it has now become completely normal for strangers to say to other perfect strangers as they pass in the street “Uffa! I can’t take it any more! WHEN are we going to get a bit of cool weather?!!” We are manifesting our impatience by creating bizarre outfits. Some people can be seen in T-shirts and woolly winter hats. I’ve seen a few young girls in vests, shorts and boots. “Phew! Just imagine the smell when she takes those off” was my husband’s comment.

“Mummy, is it really true that the leaves go red and yellow in England when it’s Autumn?” my son asked me, not sounding completely convinced. I told him, when I was his age, we used to collect the colourful leaves and glue them on big pieces of paper to decorate the classroom with Autumnal collages.

“Wow!” he said. I had clearly impressed the socks off him.

Ah, what a gift from heaven! But could you glue them on sugar paper to make a collage?

“Doing Autumn” in Sicily consists of learning all about how beautiful and wonderful grapes are, every squashy detail of how wine is made, and the name of each part of a wine press. It spills into every subject. In Religion they learn how God gave us grapes as a special gift and we drink wine during mass as it is so precious. In Italian they copy poems about it. In Art Appreciation (yeah, Italian kids do art appreciation classes when they’re six) they stick a still life by Caravaggio in their exercise book and write about the use of light and colour (purple!) in the original painting. In Science, they learn the name of every component of a grape vine. Did you know Italian has a special word for the tiny stalk that the grapes hang from, another word for the big stalk, and another one for the main stem of the plant? In Music Appreciation they are played “Autumn” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons while they draw any Autumnal scene they feel inspired to produce, and learn to identify the sounds of the musical instruments.

Could you name the Artist? Sicilians will think you’re a Twit if you can’t.

They go into the same level of detail on how olives are harvested and how oil is produced. I thought I knew this, roughly, but compared to all Sicilian seven-year olds I am an ignoramus! They label parts of oil presses and put the pictures in order. They learn words for olives that have been mushed up, and another word for the gubbins left over after you’ve pressed the extra virgin oil out but not done the second pressing to extract the oxidised, acidic junk you’re going to sell to foreigners who don’t know any better. There are about eight different verbs for different types of olive mashing, and my little boy knows them all. He even knows how to write them in joined up-writing. Some schools actually take the kids on outings at this time of year to see a local frantoio – that’s the machine that presses the oil out.

A Frantoio….. could you label the parts? Really? In Italian?

This has made me realise how much of what we are taught at school creates the national culture. I think one way you could define a culture is “the stuff that just about everyone thinks is obvious”. It’s terribly difficult to work out just what this is, until you meet someone from another culture who doesn’t know something that you have known for a very long time indeed.

When I was in primary school, I coloured in maps of Europe and learned each country and its capital. That’s why we English always think Americans are incredibly stupid for not knowing the European countries. We don’t actually stop to ask ourselves if we could reel off the capital of each of the states of America. (Actually, we could; it’s just that we don’t want to).

I memorised Bible stories with a relentless frenzy imposed by teacher after teacher. I am perpetually flabberasted that Italian children do their first communion and all that, and come out of it not knowing one single bible story. I mean really, not one. They don’t even know the proper details of the life of Jesus as told in the four gospels.

I spent lots of time learning about early British history. We did the Picts and Scots and Celts, we did the Romans, then we learned how the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded from Germany in the 5th century AD. That’s why the British press mocked Mitt Romney, aka Mitt the Twit, after one of his aides made his “we have a shared Anglo-Saxon Heritage” comment in England. If he wanted to endear himself to us, reminding us that we once got invaded by a bunch of ruddy Germans was not a good plan. And anyway, what about all the other tribes?

(I would hate to mislead any American readers into thinking the UK is behind Obama and prefers him to Romney. In reality, Mr. Obama’s carefully calculated Brit-antagonising antics have been so successful that we now hate him more than we ever hated Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Surveys have shown that, among the younger generation, the majority believe the US is no longer worth pursuing as an ally; they feel we should focus efforts on wooing up-and-coming countries like India and China instead, which is more likely to succeed, and which will reap greater benefits in the long term.)

That’s more like it! Autumn at last!

I could go on and on, but instead I need to make my son cut leaf shapes out of red, yellow and orange paper and turn them into a collage; I don’t want him to grow up into the kind of twit who thinks Canadian Maple leaves turn violet in September.

A while ago, I asked my son what he wants to be when he grows up.

“I want to be fat,” he answered without hesitation.

“Like the Daddy in the Simpsons,” he explained.

“Like Obelix the Gaul,” he emphasised.

“Like him”, he exclaimed in delight when he saw Japanese hammer thrower Koji Murofushi in the Olympics. “Big, fat and very strong!” He delightedly launched his foam rubber hammer across the living room, imitating the throwing technique with uncanny accuracy.

I am sometimes glad I don’t have a daughter. I have a friend whose 10 year old daughter is already worrying about being thin. She leaves half her dinner sometimes. She compares herself to the skinny girls at school and wishes she looked like them.

Half of me is not surprised about this. When you turn on Italian TV, this is what you typically see:

Not surprisingly, this is the doing of Berlusconi, who owns most Italian TV channels and, while president, indirectly controlled the rest.

The other half of me is shocked in disbelief that prepubescent children are already imposing this unhealthy nonsense on each other. At their age, dieting not only risks infertility and stunted growth but also irreparable organ damage. Children watch whatever adults watch nowadays. They copy everything with that total lack of criticism or judgement that is… well, typical of children.

The Italians used to be famous for their love of curvaceous women with big boobs, rounded hips and womanliness all over. Until recently, it was mandatory in all Italian movies for there to be one scene where the heroine, in her dangerously low-cut top, gets really pissed off about something and stomps away on her six inch heels, her boobs shown in close-up wobbling like a pair of jellies.

Sofia Loren

Gina Lollobrigida

Not any more. Nowadays, even in Italy, it’s all about being thin. That means the women often get false boobs, which as we all know can’t wobble even if their owner goes trampolining naked.

I know, Marilyn: you’re not the only one turning in your grave.

One of the things we women often tell each other, and which older women always tell younger girls whom they think are diet obsessed, is that men don’t like those anorexic model types. They want “something to get hold of”, we reassure each other. They like womanly women with boobs and curves, we claim hopefully.

But I am afraid that’s not true any more. Men’s opinions are influenced by the media just as much as women’s. Seeing skinny actresses playing the role of the sex symbol gives men their idea of the kind of woman who will impress their friends, and thus, the kind of woman they want to date. Does anyone formulate their beauty ideal independently of the culture they live in? Almost nobody.

Elisabetta Canalis: to be a sex symbol these days, you’ll need to be so thin your ribs look like a xylophone, then purchase two pouches of silicone to cushion them.

As I said, I am glad I don’t have to worry about this. I’m glad to be the Mum of a little boy whose ambition is to be a fat and very strong hammer thrower. And, my God, he is so beautiful! Sometimes, I look at him when he’s sleeping, and I get tears in my eyes to think how lucky I am.

We humans have always loved beauty. We have always wanted to be more beautiful. We have always favoured people we find beautiful and we always will. The only thing that changes over time is our definition of what is beautiful. Once it was this:

The Three Graces by Rubens. Note that the total removal of pubic hair has come back in, so maybe cellulite will soon have a fashion revival too

Nowadays, it’s this:

Angelina Jolie: voted the World’s Most Beautiful Woman many times, by many journalistic publications

It seems we can find just about any shape of human beautiful provided other humans tell us to do so. But can our definition of beauty please fall within the parameters of healthy?

Any responsible parent stops their children seeing sex or violence on TV. They are unsuitable for children. But what about those images that shape their idea of what is beautiful? Do we ever stop to consider if those are suitable?

As parents, we cannot just tell our teenage girls “Men like curves” or “Dieting at your age is unhealthy.” If we ever need to say that to them, it’s too late. Their beauty ideal has already been formed.

Good role models for YOUR daughter?

I don’t have to worry about having an anorexic daughter in the future. But I don’t want a git of a son either. I have decided to take control of what my boy sees on TV.

I do not allow terrestrial Italian TV to be switched on while my son is awake. I do not want my living room filled with images of unhealthily thin women dancing about in bikinis beside ugly old men who praise their beauty patronisingly, then ignore them while presenting a programme about what passes for politics in Italy.

My son may only be interested in cartoons so far, but what goes on in the background does influence children from the first day they see a television. I do not want my son to think that sexism is acceptable. I do not want him to think being thin equals being beautiful. I am determined that he will not grow up judging girls by how self-disciplined they are about dieting to below their natural weight.

Some Italian TV bimbos whom my son will never see; these women perform occasional 2-minute dances on a show in which two fully clothed, ageing men talk for two hours about current events.

I know a lot of other families in Italy who have made the same decision. I know some families who do not allow their teenage daughters to buy fashion magazines. And the number of parents making the same choices is growing. If all parents did that, the peer pressure at school would stop. If we all boycotted the fashion magazines and the unsuitable TV shows, they would eventually disappear.

We can blame the media but, in the end, we as parents CAN have control over what influences our children. We just have to take it.

In England, Christmas and New Year and all that jazz are pretty much over now. People are ready to think about diets and other unpleasant stuff.

Not in Italy. Oh no! The 6th of January is La Befana, the festival more religiously known as Epifania or Epiphany. Christmas gluttony ain’t over till she’s been!

This is the night when a friendly witch, The Befana, comes to visit every kid in Italy secretly in the night and leave them a stocking hanging on the end of their bed. If they were good over the past year, it will contain sweets. If they were naughty, it will contain a knob of coal.

In these modern times of lax discipline and parents caving in at every turn (I include myself wholeheartedly in that condemnation of modern parenting, by the way) we don’t give kids coal any more. We give them black gnarled lumps of sugar that look like coal. My brother-in-law, whose naughtiness remains legendary throughout Palermo, received this coal every year. He was about 21 before he admitted to his mother that he actually liked the black sugar lumps more than any other type of sweet.

In researching for this post I found out that first ingredient for this sugar coal is vodka or pure alcohol. Ha! No wonder! If you want to try making it, here’s a recipe in English.

Well, I do hope a few of my readers may have noticed my absence from Blogland for the last month or so. I’d like to claim I was in Lapland visiting Santa, or some similar fun excuse, but actually I was stuck in the Palermo traffic.

The reason for this was that they put up the Christmas lights. This makes driving even more dangerous than usual.

Let me explain. Sicilians love multi-coloured lights so much that, in many towns and villages, they leave up what look exactly like Christmas lights all year round. When it’s Christmas, therefore, they need to pull out all the stops and have EXTRA lights in EXTRA colours. This is so disorienting you cannot figure out where the actual traffic lights are at all. You think you are being instructed to pull into a busy intersection, when in fact you are being exhorted to adulate the Holy Virgin Mary for giving us Baby Jesus, the light of the world.

Long live the Virgin Mary and all who crash under her!

As I said, Sicilians adore coloured lights. This must be why so many of them regard traffic lights purely as decorations. Red in particular. Red is regarded as the classic summer colour in Sicily, and all Sicilian men own red trousers for the summer months, yet it is also epitomises Christmas. This makes it simply ideal for year-round street illumination.

Festive! Christmassy! and Street Appropriate! The only inexplicable thing is that this actually stands at the centre of a roundabout in Central London, England.

Car parking is a uniquely challenging activity in Sicily. With everyone doing their Christmas shopping, it was of course doubly difficult. Finding a space for your Fiat can take more time than actually driving across Palermo to your destination. Smarter drivers than you will budge in front, drive the wrong way down one way streets, and mow down toddlers in their quest to get into that tiny gap before you do.

I recently underwent the astonishing experience of waiting, indicator-a-flashing, for a car to pull out of a space outside the bakery and then pulling forward, only to find that I was beaten to the spot by a red Fiat Cinquecento (festive!) which had raced along the pavement behind seven parked cars, all the way from the crossroads, to insert itself into the space from the other side.

This almost made me want to turn into the Befana witch and throw knobs of coal at his vehicle till he moved on, or at least suffered damage to his wipers.

Hurray! We found a parking space!

Finding your parking spot is only the first part of the ordeal. Now you have to obtain a “scratch and win” type parking ticket to put on the dashboard. You must wander round asking pedestrians or shopkeepers if they know the whereabouts of the nearest café which happens to stock the relevant tickets. But woe betide you if you buy the wrong type of ticket! You need to tell the bar tender precisely where you car is parked. Then you search for your silver Fiat Punto among all the other silver Fiat Puntos, and scrape off the relevant numbers to display the time and date you parked. It is more of a “scratch and lose” activity to be honest.

When you do finally discover a space, figure out which type of parking ticket you must display on your dashboard and even hike to a bar which sells the tickets, you will only return to find that you have been boxed in by someone double parking. In many districts of Palermo, double parking is for the goody-two-shoes whilst triple-parking is de rigeur for the more relaxed motorists.

Sicilians often lament the fact that they are highly strung and fly off the handle at the drop of a hat, wishing they had more of what they perceive as our “Anglo-Saxon self control” (the correct pronunciation of which is self con-trrrrrroll). Yet I am continually astounded at the phlegm they display when finding their car boxed in by a melée of about twenty vehicles.

They will patiently sit in their car or stand near it giving the occasional laid-back hoot on the horn for simply ages, waiting for the owners of the other vehicles to amble out of the bank, pharmacy or some other establishment. Then everyone rearranges their cars to let one out, double parking them again and slowly dispersing back into the various shops they were perusing. If someone found themselves boxed in by a double-parker in England we would call the police without waiting ten seconds and some impulsive types would possibly succumb to road rage and vandalise the offending vehicle.

On the subject of hazard lights, please note that it is mandatory to turn them on whenever you are parked dangerously in a strictly no parking zone, such as blocking the entrance to an ambulance bay. Oddly, though, this is not to conform with Sicilian Christmassyness Regulations. The hazard lights tell people you are only there briefly, and for a critically important purpose, such as to get some new Christmas tree lights, swig down a coffee in a nearby bar, pick out a few pressies for your 236 aunties and hastily grab a deep-fried spleen sandwich on-the-go.

Yeah, so what would you do if you pulled up to this lot?

Well, I must dash off and try to find a parking space so I can pathetically buy my son a few black sugar lumps and some sweets as well. He’s been rather naughty this year but I am too feeble to be as witchy and harsh as I should.

Coal sweeties from the Befana

Excuse me now, I’m off to buy some vodka. Nya ha ha ha ha ha haaaaa!

My blog has been nominated for the Sunshine Award. How exciting to know my blog is really loved by someone!

This award is given to bloggers who positively and creatively inspire other bloggers. I was nominated by a blogger whom I think very well deserved this award herself, as her travel blog Brief Hiatus has often inspired me to write new posts myself, and is always uplifting to read. Her exuberant personality radiates from her writing so warmly that I almost feel as if I have actually met her in person. I would nominate her right away if she hadn’t already received the award!

Whilst I do realise blog awards are basically a form of chain letter, they are nevertheless all good in my view. They give us a chance to tell the people who write some of our favourite blogs how much we appreciate them, and perhaps introduce some of our readers to new blogs they may love too.

The rules are as follows:

Once you are nominated, you must link the blog post to the person that nominated you.

• Then you must answer some questions about yourself
• nominate 10 other bloggers and link back to their pages.
• Once that is done, you must post a comment to each nominee’s page to let them know they have been nominated.

Well, here are the Questions:

 1. Who is your favorite philosopher?

This question is to blame for the fact that I am posting this now, instead of back before Christmas when I was nominated for this award. It triggered a long attack of navel gazing on the relative merits of all the philosophers. I have a third of a degree in philosophy, which may be why I thought about this rather too profoundly. (In case you’re wondering how one gets a third of a degree, the answer is that I studied Classics, thus the other two thirds are in Latin and Greek literature, and Ancient History. Ask me about Julius Caesar crossing the River Rubicon. Go on, I dare you!)

Well, Philosophers. The Ancient philosophers were all such a bunch of nuts it is hard to choose. Should I pick Thales of Miletus, the first ever known Western Philosopher? He believed that everything is made of water, and that magnets have souls, so, nah. People who do philosophy degrees read “translations” of their thoughts in to English and think they are profound, but when you read their musings in Greek it is clear they were all just mad.

How about Pythagoras? Famous for inventing the right angled triangle, his lesser known achievements included figuring out the do-re-mi musical scale, insisting that each of the planets in our solar system hummed a musical note, and forming an extreme misogynistic religious cult that worshipped maths and sustained that shrubs and many vegetables have souls, women and black things are pure evil and we are all reincarnated repeatedly as animals, fruits or vegetables (but not dairy produce) until we achieve a kind of Nirvana in the form of a mathematical abstraction. It was costly to join his cult, rather like being a Scientologist. Whilst being pursued by a gang of unsatisfied customers he was stampeded towards a field of beans. Since he believed beans have souls and eating them is cannibalism, he chose to die rather than risk knocking a few of them off their stalks.

Yes, I’ll go with Pythagoras.

2. What is your favorite number?

Two

3. What is your favorite animal?

The bee. Most plant species would die out without their pollination services. We’d have almost no edible plant produce and certainly not enough plants to regenerate the oxygen we need, so all the animals on the planet would die out. There’s already a bee shortage in Sicily and farmers go round with brushes cross pollinating their plants by hand. I doubt that could take place on commercial farms globally.

4. What are your Facebook and Twitter?

Not saying! I value my privacy.

5. What is your favorite time of day?

Evening, when I get into bed with my little boy and we cuddle and read stories together.

6. What is your favorite holiday?

I don’t have a favourite. They are different every year!

7. What is your favorite physical activity?

Oh I probably shouldn’t say in public! OK, Besides that, I love hiking up to the tops of mountains. There is something about going through the clouds and looking down upon them that makes me feel I can think and exist on a higher plane for a while. The troubles of my life down there in that tiny-looking world shrink down into perspective. I did once get butted by a terribly large goat on Table Mountain, flew up about twelve feet in powerful winds, completed the ascent crawling on my belly, and was then bitten by a rock hyrax at the top. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

8. What is your favorite non alcoholic drink?

Tea of course! I’m English and cannot live without it.

9. What is your favorite flower?

I love all flowers and so it is hard to choose just one, but I do like Zephirine Drouin roses very much because of their exquisite perfume.

10. What is your passion?

I have so many! The common factor in all of them is creating and expressing my imagination. I love painting and sculpting, creative writing, sewing, making jewellery, playing the clarinet and really rather a long list of other things!

Now it’s time to nominate ten other bloggers and link back to their pages. In completely random order:

DOA Konsult

http://doakonsult.wordpress.com/

An Indian travel enthusiast, business consultant and philosopher who consistently writes thought provoking, challenging and fascinating posts. My life is truly enriched by his intellectual input and stimulation.

English Man In Italy

http://englishmaninitaly.wordpress.com/

This Englishman in Italy is my counterpart: Married to an Italian woman he calls Mrs Sensible, he goes through the same bewildering and sometimes frustrating sensations I do when trying to make sense of Italian logic. Yet he does it whilst steadfastly refusing to learn Italian, which I deeply admire. His accounts of everything he ever does are hilarious. I do wish he lived close to me so I could invite myself over for some PG Tips and cadge some of his Branston Pickle.

Sat Nav and Cider

http://satnavandcider.wordpress.com/

This is a photography website with interesting anecdotes accompanying the pictures. It always inspires me. The photographs are beautiful, both because of the subject matter and because of the exceptionally skilled photography.

Retiree Diary

http://retireediary.wordpress.com/

Another beautiful photography website by a retired Chinese man. His subjects are alwauys stunning and the photography is outstanding.

23 Thorns

http://23thorns.wordpress.com/

This is a hilarious South African man. Just read it. Don’t blame me if you snort tea through your nostrils.

Homesick and Heatstruck

http://homesickandheatstruck.com/

Another homesick lady living abroad, this time in the dusty Middle East. She’s entertaining and thought provoking.

Krahnpix

http://krahnpix.wordpress.com/

Stunning wildlife photos – something I have loved since I was a tiny girl and these are among the best I have ever seen. I gaze at them for a long time before clicking away and I usually return for severl more views each time new pictures are added.

Confessions of a culture addict

http://littlelor.wordpress.com/

This yound lady writes about her highly ammusing adventures in thailand. He writing style is charming and her human spirit inspires and uplifts me.

Add Grain of Earth

http://addgrainonearth.com/

This has to be the most unusual blog I follow and I think it is on a higher plane than most of us. The writer is Singaporean Chinese and, despite the fact that English is not his mother tongue, he writes with a concise beauty that sometimes reminds me of Haiku poetry. His thoughts are beautiful and surprising.

Decimawho

http://decimawho.wordpress.com/

This blog is written by a young lady who has severe, disseminated Lyme disease. I have had Lyme disease for the last 3 decades and I have suffered so much that it is one of the things I find too painful to write about or even talk about much of the time, yet she manages to write courageous and eloquent posts on the things everyone with chronic lyme disease has thought but usually dared not say; how we sometimes wish we had cancer instead, for example, because at least other people understand it is a terrible disease, and because it rapidly ends in cure or death, either of which would be preferable to living with Lyme disease.

It’s hard to find people who care about Lyme disease (for more than about 5 minutes) so those of us who have it usually rely on each other for understanding and support.

Sicilians have their own unique playing cards. They look like this:

The fishermen in my village are always out on the seafront, playing cards on upturned barrels between their fishing excursions. They all shout loud enough to startle the dead at certain card plays. They smack their winning cards down rather like a butcher hacking through bones with a meat cleaver. Sometimes they almost come to blows.

Most villages and town squares have a full-time squadron of old men who have been kicked out of the house by their wives (like putting out the cat at night), and who play together every day to pass the time.

The old men play serious complicated card games, but all Sicilian families play simpler card games after eating lunch at Christmas. These games are hilarious and ridiculous, but my husband realised recently they are great way to trick children into practising mental arithmetic without realising it. Since then, my household has turned into a mini gambling den.

Sicilian cards – coins

Sicilian playing cards date from medieval times and supposedly were introduced by the Arabs. They come in a pack of forty-two, with ten cards in each of the four suits. The suits are coins, cups, cudgels and swords.

The number cards go up to seven, and then there is the equivalent of a young lady/princess, a cavalier, and the king.

Sicilian cards – cudgels (this is my favourite suit as it reminds me of Fred Flintstone)

Nearly all the games have to be played by putting up stakes, and the game doesn’t really work without the betting. The children love this, because their parents give them a small stack of 20 or 50 cent coins and they sometimes win more. And parents don’t mind, as it gives kids even more maths practise.

Well, now I’m going to describe some great fun Sicilian card games. You can play them with ordinary cards just as well, or if you want to get in the Sicilian mood you can order Sicilian cards online from Amazon. (NB. I have not personally ordered cards from here, I get them for one Euro in the tobacconist in my village!)

Sicilian cards – swords

“Buona Sera Signorina” (Good evening, Miss)

The cards

A Sicilian deck of 40 cards is used. Suits are ignored.

The players

Equally fun with children, or drunken adults in a pub. This game works with anything from 2 to about 8 players. Everyone needs to be able to reach the stack of cards at the centre of the table. If you have a rectangluar table, make sure the biggest people are at the ends and the little kids are along the sides.

The play

Deal all the cards. One player at a time turns up one card at the centre of the table, working anticlockwise around the table.

The object of the game is to get rid of all your cards. One by one players are eliminated and the game continues until one loser is left.

•             If the card is a young lady, everyone must say “Buona sera, Signorina” (Good evening, Miss)

•             If the card is the Cavalier, everyone must say “Buona sera, Signore”. (Good evening, Sir)

•             If it is the king everyone must stand up, whistle and salute. (People who don’t know how to whistle are allowed to blow a raspberry instead)

•             If it is an ace, you must slap your hand down on the pile of cards (or the hand of whoever got there before you).

The last person to perform these actions, or anyone who does the wrong action, must take all the cards from the centre of the table. The last person to slap their hand down on the stack of cards (and hands) when an ace is turned up has to take all the cards.

You are out of the game when you have eliminated your cards. The loser is the person who ends up with all the cards.

Now you’re realising how silly Sicilian games are, here’s another one that starts quite sensible then degenerates…

Sicilian cards – cups (or “Awards”, as my little boy calls them)

Cu Cu (pronounced Cuckoo, quite appropriately)

The cards

A Sicilian deck of 40 cards is used. Suits are ignored.

The players

Three or more players can play this game but the more players there are, the better.

The play

The game begins with every player putting three portions of an agreed stake of money on the table, e.g. each player places three 50 cent coins in a row. These represent the player’s three “lives.”

Each player is dealt 1 card, kept secret. The objective is to hold the card with the highest value. Play works around the table, starting with the person to the right of the dealer.

If you are dealt a low value card, when it is your turn, you pass your unwanted card to the player on your right, and they have to give you theirs in return. You make this exchange if you think their card is likely to be better than yours is. If you are dealt a relatively high card, you say “pass” when it is your turn, and keep your card.

If a player has the king they do not have to give it up. When it is their turn, or if challenged to swap, they announce Cu cu!, turn up their King card for everyone to see, and the player to their left must keep his card. Play continues around the table.

At the end of the round, the dealer, who is also the banker, turns up his card. If it has a low value, he can split the pack to take another card, but if that is worse than the one he had, he still has to keep the new card. At this point all the other players reveal their cards.

The people with a lower value card than the banker hand over one of their coins to the bank at the centre of the table. If the banker has the lowest value card, he pays up one of his three “lives” to the bank.

For the next round of play, the person to the right of the original dealer becomes the new dealer. The role of dealer moves around the table, changing with each round of play.

When a player has lost all three coins and has no more money, he is “dead.” This means he can no longer play and nobody can speak to him. If anyone makes the mistake of speaking to a dead player, they must give him one of their 50p coins – a new life – and then he is back in the game.

The fun of this game really starts when players “die” and try to trick their companions into speaking to them to bring them back to life. Some players resort to kind offers such as “would you like a cup of coffee,” whereas others pretend to be zombies trying to strangle the other players, or wailing ghosts, in the hope of provoking a rebuke. My brother in law this year took to washing dishes and putting them in the wrong places, which guaranteed a comment from my mother-in-law. My son discovered tickling people’s feet under the table worked well. No tactic is disallowed other than extreme violence.

If you decide to play either of these games, let me know how you got on! And if anyone wants to know the rules of some more adult, complex games, just ask and I’ll add another post.

PART UMPTEEN OF AN OCCASIONAL, HYSTERICAL SERIES

We have had torrents of rain for the last week. As a result, driving my son to school has been permanently upgraded from a Level 2 to a Level 1 risk activity. This is because of the new holes that have formed in the road.

I do have a money-making plan to take advantage of this, though. I am going to open one of the giant holes in the road as a municipal open-air swimming pool and sell admission tickets to locals. I shall open the other networked hole-complex as the “Bagheria caves and grotto” and charge an exorbitant admission fee to tourists, which will include a guided tour and a souvenir lump of dislodged asphalt.

Well, this local event reminded me to publish another installment in my occasional series on Driving in Sicily.

Road holes are a major hazard in Sicily. They are literally everywhere. You will never find twenty feet of road free of a significant hole. Like my new local ones, they can often be as much as two feet deep. Look out for puddles! They may contain far more water than you estimated!

When driving along in a particularly holey area, you can adopt one of two tactics. One is to look for a hump before the hole, accelerate towards it and thus lift your vehicle up into the air enabling it to fly over the hole and land gently the other side. This is clearly a technique for advanced drivers. The other is simply to swerve around all holes slalom-style to avoid thumping down into them.

Fiats have fairly “rigid” suspension, so some form of hole avoidance is to be recommended. Extreme hole avoidance can become addictive, however, and as cars overtaking you may not have got round to hooting at you yet, it would clearly be dangerous if you were to take a huge and sudden swerve in front of them.

Hole avoidance on motorways is particularly important, and complex.

Motorway driving in Sicily is completely different from motorway driving in the rest of Europe. The motorways only have two lanes. I am aware they are like this in Germany too, and that Germans solve the problem by driving along one behind the other at 120 miler per hour, leaving a safe stopping distance of three quarters of an inch. Most Sicilians solve the problem by driving along the hard shoulder instead.

In Sicily there is also the problem of finding cars travelling up the slip road in the wrong direction. There is the fact that the ‘I’m pulling out if you don’t hoot’ rule means Sicilian drivers always pull out of slip roads in front of you, because they have already built up so much speed that no matter how much you hoot, the Doppler effect means they think it was a rare bird cooing to its love in a distant nest.

Above all, there is the fact that there are never any warning notices or road cones set up to close a lane when there are road works going on. You just find yourself screaming at seventy miles an hour towards a vast hole, forming a dead-end, demarcated by a sign embellished with diagonal red stripes and a row of bum cleavages, getting sunburnt and sweaty while their owners mess about with tarmac (yes, some things are just like home). The hard shoulder on your right is occupied by a Fiat Uno on the verge of breaking the land speed record, and there is a ten ton lorry overtaking you in the lane to your left. Here is where you test the emergency braking powers of your silver Fiat Punto, and hope that the driver of the white Fiat Cinquecento behind you has got fast enough reactions to go from seventy to nought in five seconds while talking on his mobile phone which, since he’s Sicilian, makes him look as if he is conducting the Emperor Waltz with both arms and one leg.

Pedestrians are the final road hazard to be aware of in Sicily. They are often sensible enough to realise that they should keep well out of your way, yet you will find that there is a steady but reliable supply of fools just waiting to leap in front of you as you rocket towards them.

They will often be daredevil young lads who like to feel they can outrun any Fiat Uno that may dare to defy them as they cross the road. They may be lardy little kids in tracksuits drawn towards the cake shop. Most often of all, however, they will be a little, old, round-shouldered granddad, about three feet tall, carrying a colossal crate of oranges or bread or artichokes from his delivery van to his shop. He is seventy-five years old, he has been doing this backbreaking work full-time since he was nine, and frankly he does not care if somebody takes him off now.

Or does he? Perhaps he feels his time on this earth is running out and he simply cannot afford to waste precious minutes of his remaining life waiting for all the Fiats to get out of his way. Perhaps it is because he has a picture of Padre Pio and another of the Baby Jesus of Naples pinned up in his shop and he knows they are looking out for him. Or else perhaps he knows that his six foot tall son Totò is in the Fiat behind you and, if you touch a whisker on his body, you will find yourself going swimming with concrete boots on.

This brings me to the single most important rule for road safety, not only in Sicily but throughout Italy. That is, always have a religious icon dangling from your rear view mirror. You can touch it and say a little prayer before crossing a particularly ropey-looking road bridge which has not been restored since Ancient Roman times. (Readers in America may think that is part of my trademark exaggeration, but it isn’t). You can also look at it for inspiration and safe guidance throughout performing any particularly tricky manoeuvre, such as a three-point turn on a motorway.

Sicilians will often go on a pilgrimage somewhere and bring a dangly icon or at least a rear window sticker back for their car. My Mother-in-law, The Godmother, always takes two suitcases when she travels on pilgrimages, one for luggage and a second, empty, one to fill with sacred relics to distribute among her loved ones upon her return. Sicilians also usually have the local priest come and bless their new car or motorbike before they drive it, dousing it with holy water and saying potent prayers over it. At the very least, furnish yourself with some rosary beads. They will help you defy all the odds and survive driving the streets of Palermo and the motorways of Sicily. Do not expect divine protection without them.

The pictures in this post came from this web page, which has many other very funny ones too:
http://www.time4leasing.co.uk/car_fun.asp

I’ve been meaning to write about Sicilian electricians for a while. I needed to accumulate a good set of photos, though, as pictures speak louder than words.

Sometimes, in fact, they scream while shuddering all over with all their hair standing up on end, fizzing with 240 volts.

While I was taking this photo, the resident of the house emerged onto her balcony. Ahem! Embarrassing! She confirmed that they are indeed live wires connected to the mains. Then she started watering the plants, so I didn’t ask why, I ran away.

Here’s a picture of her neighbour’s house:

…And another one up the road: This is the proper, safe method of electrical wiring in Sicily and it is usually fine, until the wires stretched out across the road snap, and flutter down, the ends caressing passing vehicles.

Now for some architecture.

I do adore this one. If you observe the very new-looking doorbells, you’ll realise this gate is in regular use, and forms the main entrance to a large number of apartments.

But what makes it so fabulous is the attached cardboard notice, which says…

“THIS GATE HAS BEEN REPAIRED SO CLOSE IT GENTLY. THANK YOU.”

On the other hand, here are some balconies which I believe have not been repaired lately:

Don’t they make a great pair? One has no front and the other has no bottom. Some smart handyman will no doubt soon think of cobbling the two together to make a single, usable balcony.

I would have rung on the doorbell to suggest this to the owner, but I was too chicken.

These pictures were taken in two very average towns called Lercara Friddu and Piana Degli Albanesi. I could have taken many photos, indeed more shocking ones, right outside my own front door, but I felt it would be too rude. I took my chances in these towns, as they are very far from my home and nobody knows me.

Yet I must tell you a story that happened in my village.

I was waiting to see the doctor and got chatting to an old man. He told me his son had broken both legs, his pelvis, a collar bone and one arm when a balcony landed on him.

“He was very lucky,” said the old man. He wasn’t being sarcastic. In Italy, people die every year from derelict balconies landing on them as they walk out of their front door.

Well, his son spent a very long time stuck at home and was getting serious cabin fever. He couldn’t even sit up, as he was set rigid in plaster and metal bars. After some months, when he was nearly healed, his best friend came over with his Fiat Uno, opened the boot, put the back seat down and slotted his friend into the car from behind.

“I’m taking you to the pub,” he said cheerfully.

Then his friend got into the driving seat, shut the car door, and the sudden noise made the balcony he was parked under collapse completely and crash down onto the car.

“My son would have died if he had been sitting up instead of lying flat,” the old man told me. “His friend got a broken neck.

“They’re in hospital together now,” he added. “They’re both so lucky. God was looking out for them.”

Here are the rusty remains of a balcony whose concrete base has collapsed:

I do hope God was looking out for whoever was under this one when it ended its existence!

I posted some photos of the hair-raising electrical wiring in Lercara Friddi last week. I feel I should do the place justice by showing a more complete picture… so here goes.

Hubby and I went there shortly after the annual festival celebrating the town pie, the pantofola. Pantofola means slipper. They still had some left over, so we walked into the first tasty-smelling bar we could find, and started eating.

The bar faced the central piazza, where the local old boys gather each Sunday to get away from their wives. Hubby wanted to listen to the political candidate who was haranguing them. I decided my own time would be better spent pretending that I know how to use my new camera.

I did see a lot of electrical wiring but I also found that, with careful cropping, you can take photos like this:

And this:

Alternatively, you can ambush unsuspecting oldies to get pretentious armchair travel guide photos, like this:

Or this:

When that gets boring, you can take arty-farty images for those interior design books that my Mother and gay men leave on their coffee tables:

This one is called “Postboxes” and signed prints of it may be ordered for $3,000 each:

This one is entitled “Italian letter box”, with the alternative title of “Don’t stick anything in here because it will never be seen again”. Framed enlargements of this copyrighted image may be ordered online, but they will never arrive.

After photographing some outrageous wiring, I spotted a horse meat butcher’s shop. Sicilians only eat horse meat when they are ill, as they believe it has special nutritional qualities. They particularly give it to people with anaemia and to children with leukaemia. It is never sold by normal butchers, but only in these dedicated horse shops.

If the horse meat doesn’t work, one may need to organise a funeral. I could not believe the number of funeral posters I saw around Lercara Friddi. I didn’t see a living soul there the right side of 60 to be honest, which may not be entirely unconnected. Sicilians often advertise forthcoming funerals by putting up posters all around town, like this:

It’s a service offered by the funeral home. They also sometimes put up posters after the funeral as well, thanking everyone who came. Seeing them casually jumbled up with political campaign posters and advertisements for the local supermarkets made me suddenly feel very foreign:

Hubby and I were now starving and headed out of town to meet our friends, who had invited us for lunch. We had a meal cooked by this man. He was clean when he vanished into the kitchen, but when he energed 45 minutes later he was spattered all over with tomato sauce and the kitchen looked rather like a slaughterhouse. I’m sorry to say his wife managed to wipe a President Gorbachev-style dollop off his forehead before I managed to take the photo.

Anyway, the food was delicious.

On the way back into town we saw a few sheep…

…And their shepherd on horseback. Look out Mr. Shepherd! Don’t take you eyes off that trusty steed! The oldies of Lercara Friddi might eat him!

On our way home we were engulfed in smoke and realised that a fire was raging around a house just outside town.

“That was probably caused by an electrical fault” said hubby, as we callously drove away.

Yesterday, someone in Belarus hacked into my Facebook account. What did the Slavonic sod want? What did he find out about me?

I have images of him in my head, in his standard-issue East European shell suit trousers, toasting his friends with a bottle of Stolichnaya in one hand and a samovar full of beetroot soup in the other, dolefully singing “Kalinka my Love” together to celebrate the fact that they finally have the password to a valid Amazon account, and can order their suicidally depressing 8,000-page Russian novels online from someone else’s bank account.

What Russians drink instead of tea

Or is he a pedophile who downloaded photos of all my friends’ kids? and now knows where they live?

Of course we don’t need to be hacked to have our privacy invaded. Facebook does it for us. You keep saying “No Thanks” to Timeline and, next thing you know, you have it anyway.

Suddenly all your comments about your Mother-in-law’s fetish for sausages, and photos documenting the time you accidentally emptied an entire ice-cream cornet down your cleavage, are viewable by “public” instead of “friends only.” One of  your contacts comments on a photo you’ve posted, so now all their friends can see it too.

You decide to politely click “like” on a random article you read online, about how to write a novel so bestselling it will leave Stephenie Meyer in the gutter, and mysteriously there’s an announcement to all your Facebook contacts that “The Sicilian Housewife likes The Twilight Saga” accompanied by a photo of a topless, oiled Taylor Lautner smouldering at the camera (or possibly having contact lens trouble, it’s hard to tell.) Not only this, but the author of the article is now one of your “friends” and can read everything you have ever put on Facebook.

The Sicilian Housewife is old enough to be this boy’s mother. She hopes her own boy will grow up to be as rich as him, though not necessarily so shiny.

Sicilians have a totally different way of doing privacy. An excellent way. Read on for instructions.

At first sight they don’t understand privacy. The Italian language has no word for it. In an Italian-English dictionary, you are offered words which mean intimacy, isolation, or solitude as a translation for privacy. The Italian solution to this linguistic shortfall is simply to use the English word, pronounced very badly with an Italian accent: praaaivasee.

It is a trendy buzz word in Sicily these days. This is probably because of La Legge Sulla Privacy, or ‘The Law About Privacy,’ which is what the Italians call their version of the Data Protection Act. Sicilians love this law because it gives them a universal, infallible excuse for laziness and incompetence. “No I can’t give you your blood test results because of the Legge sulla privacy.” “No I can’t give you any money out of your bank account because of the Legge sulla privacy.” “No I can’t move my car out of the way of your garage door because of the Legge sulla privacy.”

One of my neighbours, Mrs. Greenfingers, planted a row of luscious leafy plants along her railings last summer, which created a bit of dappled shade and reduced the x-ray view passers-by had into her living room by about ten percent. Everyone in the street praised her on this wonderful idea for obtaining a bit of privacy. Sorry, I mean praaaivasee.

A simulation of what the neighbours’ Praivaseeee may look like in a few decades if she waters it with 300 litres a day and The Godmother stops snapping leaves off it

My Mother-in-law (rendered internationally famous by this very blog, under her alias The Godmother) liked it more than anyone. Every time she came to visit us, she would stop, bend over and peer through it, looking for a suitable hole through which to check whether the neighbour was at home. The Godmother wanted a good look at her privacy. Mrs. Greenfingers was usually in her garden, peering back out.

If not, The Godmother would push some leaves aside and shout out at the top of her voice until she emerged, and responded to The Godmother’s friendly greetings and enquiries into her private life. Indeed, the Godmother asked her for gardening advice on cultivating such a succulent screen, as she had decided she thought her newly installed privacy was so enviable they would like to have some praaaaivaseee of her own. Don’t run away with the idea my mother-in-law is a particularly prying person. Oh no, everybody peered through that plant screen, all the time.

Last time I was at The Godmother’s house, she carefully explained privacy to one of her neighbours. Since privacy is so trendy, she was certainly not going to pass up her chance to show off a bit.

“My daughter-in-law is English, and they think privacy is very important,” she boasted from her balcony, her tea-towel fluttering in the breeze. “They have a terrace outside for doing barbecues, but there’s a solid wall between them and the neighbours, so they can eat in privacy. That’s the new way of doing it,” she explained, switching into Sicilian conspiratorially. “Capisci?”

She pronounces capisci as capeesh, and it means “do you understand?” Sicilians only use this word at the end of a detailed explanation of something precious, a titbit of information for the select few. Getting “capeeshed” is a priviledge that, I am proud to say, The Godmother has bestowed on me several times.

The next day, The Godmother turned up unexpectedly at my house with a special kind of Sicilian sausage that is about three yards long and all coiled up into a spiral. If you’ve ever been on one of those up-the-jungle holidays in Thailand and tried to avoid malarial encephalitis by taking a rucksack full of moist mosquito coils with you, you’ll be able to visualise it quite well. You usually slap it onto a barbecue, but The Godmother did the other great Sicilian thing, frying it in orange juice.

Ready to be submerged in freshly squeezed orange juice and cooked over a slow heat till it’s so delicious your husband will want to risk his life to deliver a free sample to the next-door-but-one neighbour

Since the sausage tasted simply divine, the processed pork product of the gods, my husband decided to make the neighbours try some. Sicilians do this whenever they cook something that turns out particularly delicious. We happened to be up on the roof terrace: you know, that one with solid walls that gives us our wonderfully trendy privacy.

Hubby hammered on The Wall of Privacy till he established, with disappointment, that the immediate neighbours were out. Then he climbed up onto the wall, so he could peer past the immediate neighbours’ roof terrace, and into the terrace of the neighbours beyond them, Mr. and Mrs. Greenfingers, to find out if they were at home.

I should explain here that The Wall of Privacy has a slippery marble top, which slopes downwards towards the outer wall of the house. After springing up onto it, with his bum hovvering over a sheer drop of at least 30 feet, Hubby spotted Mr. Greenfingers and started telling him in Sicilian about sausages. Actually, he had to attract his attention by shouting rather loudly, at an estimated 700 decibels - another Sicilian cultural tradition. I’m pretty sure, by this time, they even knew about that sausage as far away as Catania and maybe even Naples.

I love this piccy of a fat pig and this cute, fat little girl, painted by Marion Peck. Click on the picture to reach the artist’s page, where the picture comes from.

Mr. Greenfingers was so excited about tasting the porcine ambrosia that Hubby grabbed some and climbed over The Wall of Privacy, the one that looks like a chute made for whooshing you off the terrace and down 30 feet to a splattery death, all the while holding the plate of sausage in the air like a silver service waiter. His legs flailed over the precipice, his buttocks dared to defy gravity, and finally he plopped to safety on the other side. He walked across the immediate neighbour’s roof terrace, commenting that their new barbecue looked nice, and handed some sausage to Mr. Greenfingers. Whilst he ate it on the spot and broke into poetic eulogies about The Godmother’s culinary talents, I was having a hyperventilation attack. I had almost been widowed.

An artist’s impression of my husband, perched upon The Wall of Privacy

While Hubby climbed back (my head was in my hands by now, I couldn’t look), The Godmother and Mr. Greenfingers engaged in a chat about the wonders of praaaaivaseee.

I think all this makes it abundantly clear that Sicilians just don’t comprehend privacy in the English sense of the word.

They know how to keep secrets, though. One of the harshest criticisms a Sicilian can make of anyone is “Da troppo confidenza!” This means, “He confides too much”, or “He is too open”. You’re supposed to keep your personal stuff personal, no blabbing. Capeesh?

I hardly know a single Sicilian who uses their real name on Facebook or their email address. They all invent an alias, so you can only identify them if they have revealed it to you. Their profile photo is a wacky image of a cat or some boobs or a big piece of cheese. They use Facebook to play games like Farmerama or pass on silly jokes and cartoons. They never write about their families or anything else personal.

The neighbours can peer through the plants or look at their new barbecue all they want. Online, they’re anonymous and untraceable.

Who cares if the neighbours have climbed into their garden and seen their barbecue? At least they know that no future employer will ever find out what they do when they’re drunk, no hacker will ever use their bank account to order the complete works of Tolstoy bound in de luxe leather, and no pedophile will ever see a photo of their kids in their swimming trunks.

In the modern world, isn’t that real privacy?

Honestly. They spend more time scrubbing, washing and generally sanitising things than they do in any other activity, save possibly ironing.

This year, I am joining in the spirit of things by spring cleaning early. I didn’t want to, but my Mother-in-law made me. I admit the place has become a little grimy but, frankly, I thought the fact we no longer have running water was a more than adequate excuse. In fact I don’t even know how one cleans a house without using water. But my Mother-in-law does! Of course she does. She’s Sicilian.

The Godmother brought a small selection of her own scrubbing brushes, in case my own hoard was inaequate

Well, I am far too busy dry-cleaning my home to write a blog post this week. I think the best way to keep you in the picture is by re-posting my report on My first ever spring-cleaning activities directed by my Mother-in-law.

So, here it is.

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My mother-in-law is a fairly typical Sicilian woman of the older generation. She has a big nose, big hands and a big bottom. When her mansize hands are not busy flaying and massacring vegetables or scrubbing household objects to the brink of oblivion, they fiddle with rosary beads. She goes to church twice on Sundays and is godmother to seven children. The Godmother. She likes to feed children portions of food which weigh more than they do, indoctrinate them in the ways of the Lord and scrub their faces by a method plastic surgeons call ‘dermabrasion. You would not want to be naughty in her presence. Her hands could probably spank even a decent-sized adult man into low-earth orbit.

When I worked in a bank in London, I thought that being able to sew would stand me in good stead when I became a housewife. I thought it meant I had potential. Then I met The Godmother, who is the very walking definition of uxoriousness in flesh and blood, and I realised how much more difficult it was all going to be than I had ever imagined.

For example, I had always thought – foolishly, as it now turns out – that there were certain objects in this world which it is simply never necessary to clean. Ever.

The pavement, for example, was something I had never once looked at in my life and thought, ‘Well now, I think I’ll give that a good scrub.’ Yet, apparently, to be a decent housewife, a decent Sicilian one at any rate, it is essential to wash the pavement outside one’s house quite regularly, on one’s hands and knees, using a scrubbing brush that could flay an elephant and the kind of cleaning products that you probably need a special license to purchase in England.

Similarly, I had never once been tempted to lather up a set of iron railings and then rinse them down, dry them and buff them up with a soft cloth. I just figured that the rain took care of removing clumps of dirt… slattern that I was!

Another item I imagined could be left unwashed throughout its whole existence was my wardrobe. I had spent years in England squirting it with Mr. Sheen and giving it a quick buff-up with a cloth to get the visible deposits of dust off it. Once I moved to Sicily, however, I was made to realise I had been leaving it to accumulate filth and that the only way a respectable housewife would treat such an item of furniture would be to wash it thoroughly with ammonia and water and then dry it with a series of special cloths, first a cotton one and then a woollen one and then one in microfibre.

One day, The Godmother came round to my house when I had just swept and mopped all the floors. She was wearing her black skirt and black blouse, which is what Sicilian housewives put on when they really mean business. She gave me a pitying, or perhaps critical, look and said,

“Oh, you poor thing! You must be so worn out with all this unpacking and organising that you haven’t had time to clean the floor.”

“Erm, yes,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her nose already in the cleaning products cupboard she had given me as a house warming present. “I’ll take care of it.”

She extracted a thing which looked like a broom with no bristles and then wrapped it in a cloth which she dipped in something that smelled pungent enough to make my nose run, and proceeded to rub it all over the floor with so much verve I thought she might actually erode the glaze off the tiles. “That’s just given it a quick removal of the main dirt,” she said, as she got on her knees and proceeded to pull the plinth away from the fitted cupboards under and around the kitchen sink.

She put the steel strips on the balcony and then proceeded to remove the entire underside of the island unit as well. Not satisfied with this, she then prised all the knobs off the hob, did something that looked downright painful to remove the oven door and then turned the extractor fan over the cooker into no less than eighteen separate, yet almost identical-looking, pieces of plastic grille.

Whilst I was profoundly shocked to see her calmly pull my kitchen to pieces, I was also flabbergasted that she was actually able to. For my whole life, up to that point, I had believed you needed men with exposed bum cleavages to do that type of thing.

While I was still searching for appropriate words, she filled the sink with several potent products, which foamed and gave off a greenish hallucinogenic vapour, and put all the small components of my ex-kitchen in it. While I sat down to regain some breath, she filled a bucket with whatever the Mafia use to dissolve dead bodies away to nothing except a few gold fillings, and started rubbing it into the pieces of stainless steel plinth she had yanked off the cupboards. I had chosen a matt finish but she kept working away at each piece of metal until she had made it look like a mirror.

The Godmother’s shopping list

I felt exhausted simply from watching all this manual labour, but I also began to realise I was suffering some kind of acute respiratory crisis. I was wheezing loudly and my vision was clouding over as if there were some type of jelly stuck to the front of my eyeballs. Apparently my eyes were turning maroon and I sounded like a Fiat that had accidentally been filled with diesel. I was having a severe allergic reaction to The Godmother’s cleaning products.

I dashed into the bathroom and begged her to identify the pack of antihistamine I knew I had
stashed away somewhere. She rummaged about and asked how many tablets I wanted. I told her to give me all of them. As I was shovelling them into my mouth, I realised she was buffing up the mirror with a dry cloth between popping the pills out of the foil blisters. She is the kind of woman who, if one of her children got his head stuck in a saucepan, would give it a jolly good polish before taking him to the hospital. If someone broke into her house by throwing a brick through the window she would wash the brick before calling the police. If she ever drank tea she would iron the teabags before using them.

I made my way out of the house, out of the chemical inferno which had once been my kitchen, sneaked into the lemon orchard behind the house, and sat on a patch of scratchy grass under a tree. It was still swelteringly hot but at least there was some shade which protected my watering eyes from the full power of the sunlight. I would like to say, especially if any minors are reading this, that overdosing on oral antihistamines and snorting kitchen de-scaler is a stupid and dangerous thing to do.

Always read the label

I felt as if I were drifting out of my body and wafting around among the leaves of the lemon trees in the form of a curly green waft of vaporised ammonia, carbolic acid and hydrogen peroxide. I think I hallucinated the bit where the lemons were talking to me about how they liked me wiping them clean with my eyeballs. I think the bit where I slumped against the trunk of a tree and slowly keeled over through lack of oxygen may have been real. The bit where The Godmother shouted ‘Veronica, Veronica, wake up!’ was definitely right here on planet earth, and it worked.

Eventually I recoved from this experience and came to an important realisation: I may be a Sicilian housewife now, but I shall continue housewifing in a very English way. I’ll never manage to do it the way Sicilian women do. I salute them, and I give up.

So please excuse me while I step over a thick smear of ketchup on my way to the kettle, because I need a cup of tea.

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I am excited by the international nature of my blog followers. I would like to take advantage of this cosmopolitan company I am now keeping, by conducting a cultural survey.

Please remember to state your nationality when responding!

1. Do people wash the pavement outside their house in your country?

2. Do the builders have exposed bum cracks where you come from?

3. Have you ever had a hazardous/frightening/life-threatening experience with a domestic disinfection product?

A prime example of Plumber’s Bum, taken from a blog dedicated entirely to documenting the phenomenon of ill-fitting trousers on manually skilled professionals. If you want a good laugh, the blog is well worth a visit!

http://bumsandcracks.blogspot.it/

Sorry I haven’t written any posts for so long. I’ve been too busy mopping up puke.

My little boy has vomited almost every day for the last three months. The house smells like a bleach factory, and I am buying new mops from the local hardware store so often that the cashier there thinks I fancy him, and am just buying the mops as an excuse to hang out. Lately, he has started hiding behind the screwdriver display when I show up, and making his mum serve me.

Is a housewife stalking you? Try using these…

Why has my son been chundering so much? Well, he’s got Lyme disease. I already had it when I got pregnant, without knowing it – since hardly any doctors know how to recognise it. They usually misdiagnose you with hypochondria instead. And so my son was born with congenital Lyme.

My son has been taking combined antibiotics for the last 3 years, non stop, but Lyme disease is one of the most antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world. It’s worse than syphilis and tuberculosis, both of which often need over a year of antibiotics to eradicate. One person in three with Lyme disease never gets cured.

While I’m quoting statistics, I’d also like to mention that Lyme disease worldwide is now spreading four times faster than AIDS. Where is the government research? Where are the sequinned, star-spangled Hollywood fundraising events?

Nobody even knows about Lyme disease. Once you get diagnosed with it, it’s like entering a secret society of the knowing, like the Freemasons or the Illuminati or maybe Mossad. Only we, the Diseased Ones, know how widespread it is. Only we know that research has proven 80% of cases of autism are caused by Lyme disease. Only we know that once you get Lyme disease, your life will never be the same again.

Forget eyeballs on pyramids – this is the top secret symbol of The Diseased Ones; a Lyme-disease awareness ribbon

So, well, apart from the endless retching, what else is Lyme disease doing to my son? He cannot hold a pen and write properly because his hands are too weak. He’s lost physical co-ordination and often drops things, or falls over for no reason. He has headaches nearly every day. When he is tired, he cannot see properly. His knee joints are arthritic and sometimes he limps. He cannot run, he just shuffles along in slow motion when trying to play with his friends. He’s seven years old, by the way. He forgets things that he knows perfectly well, like how to tell the time. I’m currently teaching him that for the third time in two years.

Borrelia Burgdorferi – the bacteria that cause lyme disease (or hypochondria, depending on your personal beliefs)

Do you know what the worst thing is?

The worst thing is when other people moan and fuss about trivial ailments. I don’t mind offering sympathy to anyone, I really don’t. But when they lack any awareness of proportion, it sometimes makes me want to strangle them.

My neighbour (Mrs. Sterile, in case anyone’s keeping track of the locals in this blog) made more fuss when her son banged his head and got a bruise on it than any cardiac patient I saw in the hospital in England when I was there having heart surgery.

Her son had been riding his tricycle, which tipped over sideways and made him bump his head on the ground. She fainted immediately, then came round and hyperventilated. Her son cried loudly, largely because he was scared by what his mother was doing, which meant he MUST be taken to hospital. The amount of hand-waving and Sicilian cries of desperation exceeded anything I had ever witnessed before. She was even slapping her hands against her forehead the way Arabs do at funerals. All over a bruise about one inch in diameter.

My husband and I were recruited as chauffeurs, since she and her husband were both too hysterical to drive. She did actually coerce my husband to drive up the hard shoulder of the motorway for about a quarter of a mile when we encountered a bit of a traffic jam, by throttling him from behind and pulling out some handfuls of his hair. I think he could have taken the throttling but it was the hair-pulling that convinced him, as he really doesn’t have any surplus to spare.

At the hospital, she fainted again. Once she had been administered to, she screamed and grabbed several doctors by the lapels of their white coats, getting dragged along the corridor since she refused to let go of them, asking them in floods of tears if there was any hope her son would pull through without major brain damage. Then she insisted they put him on a drip for 2 hours – which they did purely because she was disrupting the whole ER department and it was the only way to shut her up. Whilst this was happening, she got out some rosary beads and her husband and she prayed together, except that she couldn’t pray effectively because she was weeping so much. Eventually the hospital found a couple of strong porters to kick her whole family out.

The best part was that, a couple of weeks later, she arranged a special thanksgiving mass to honour Saint Rosalia of Palermo for rescuing her son from the jaws of death. She invited 350 of her closest relatives.

Well, last week she spotted be fetching my son home from school early. I have done that every day he’s been to school, since Christmas. I leave him there and then, sooner or later, the school phones me saying he has vomited, and will I come and get him please? So what did Mrs. Sterile say?

“Oh there’s nothing wrong with him! Look at how big and tall he is. He’s just fooled you into believing he’s ill, because he doesn’t want to go to school.”

His history teacher said roughly the same thing two weeks ago. She thinks he’s mastered the art of hurling at will, just so he can go home early when he’s bored with lessons.

No doubt my seven-year-old ordered himself some of this online…

Should I show them all the results measuring the high level of Lyme bacteria in his blood? Should I show them the blood test results which demonstrate his immunodeficiency? Yes, Lyme disease damages your immune system. Or should I just run them over next time I get the chance? I know I should be grown up about it and take no notice of them, but take it from me, there’s only so much patience any individual can muster.

Another neighbour even topped this. I had confided in her that I was terrified for my son’s future. He was three years old back then, and had just been diagnosed with autism. We didn’t know he had Lyme disease back then. Lyme disease enters into your brain, and whilst it has horrible effects upon adults, the damage it does to children’s developing brains is particularly devastating. The doctors had told me he was mentally retarded, and may never learn to talk at all.

“Oh, I know just how you feel,” said my neighbour. She then went on to tell me about when her daughter had a “lazy eye”, and had to do eye exercises for a year to correct it.

“It was awful. They told me she might have to wear glasses for the rest of her life,” my devastated neighbour concluded.

“That must have been terrible for you I said,” pushing my spectacles back up my nose. “You must be such a strong person to have got through it.”

If your child or pet suffers from squinting, you can order vision-correcting glasses for them online or in all good joke shops.

Anyway, I’m signing off now as I have to go down to the hardware store and take a really good look at the screwdriver display.

I have been rummaging through the statistics for my blog today. When I was new to this blogging lark, I did it obsessively. Nowadays I just take an occasional look at the search engine terms which have brought new visitors to my blog.

One of the strings typed into Google that immediately jumped out at me was:

How to get rid of large deep bumps in pubic area

Before you go frantically looking, I can assure you there is no relevant advice whatsoever on my blog. I am at a loss to explain why on earth Google thought the owner of this distressing pubic phenomenon would get help from this Sicilian Housewife.

I also wonder exactly what kind of Sicilian Housewife google thinks I am, since the following phrase also brought a new visitor to my site:

italian housewives cleveges

Upon checking this phrase for myself, I discovered it turns up my article on Sicilian builders and their bottoms, with the following image:

Plumber’s bum

Though I cannot speak with the authority of a randy man with a fetish for Italian housewives, I seriously doubt that the Internet surfer in question found this image satisfying. Indeed, I wonder if this poor horny fool ever found any cleavages, since he doesn’t know how to spell them? He may have been the same desperado who went on to search using the phrases

Sex between plumber and homemaker

and

Women in Sicily with big tits

And I imagine his desperation mounted by the second as he realised he just kept finding his way to my blog over and over again, and all it has on it is heartless mockery of women who care about washing their linens whiter, and ironic explanations of why you should never clean snotty dog nose-prints off your patio doors.

Was he the same desperate and rather kinky fellow who typed:

Bimbo feet smelly

… and if so, which of my blog posts did that take him to?

Moving from the smutty to the ridiculous, a few other searches that reached my site were these:

i am a surgical tech can i still scrub in if i have stitches in my hand

Which native American tribe had a pug nose as a strong feature

Discipline itch collar priest food bowl

Why Sicilians don’t look black

a vivaldi is when you are stuck in the queue of a call center and they play four seasons, only to be answered when you finally reach autumn

Village housewife armpit images

Slim women dangling tits

And finally:

Housewife like to work naked at home

They made a TV show about “desperate housewives”; I never knew till now that, actually, the world is packed with men desperate for housewives!

So, do you write a blog? What’s the freakiest search term that has ever brought a visitor to your blog?

A lot of Sicilians would. In fact, a lot of them do.

Of course Albert Einstein is the Poster Boy for cousin marriage. Not only were his parents cousins, but he also went ahead and married his own cousin. His wife was either his first cousin or his second cousin, depending which parent you trace the relationship through.

Albert Eiinstein: Proof that cousin marriage produces perfectly ordinary children.

The first time I was admitted to hospital in Sicily, and the doctor was filling out the cover of the cardboard folder that was to hold my medical notes, he asked me my name, date of birth, blood group and then said,

“Are your parents related to each other?”

I screamed with laughter so raucously that I almost fell off my trolley.

He showed me that there really was a box printed on the form, for him to tick YES or NO, and to write alongside it the specific details of exactly how inbred I was. I guess this is what happens in a society where many people are so pathologically distrustful of outsiders that they only ever get to socialize with their own family.

By way of cultural contrast, when you get admitted to a hospital in England, they fill out that folder by writing your personal details and how many units of alcohol you consume each week (or is it each day?) to the nearest dozen. So you see, whilst Sicilians are a bunch of incestuous teetotalers, we British are genetically diverse beer monsters.

He may be mad on booze but, as you can see, this English gentleman has none of the abnormal genetic characteristics that can result from inbreeding.

Sicilians don’t trust people from the next village. One of their favourite insults is “They’re all inbred in THAT village.” Yet actually, they’re all inbred in ALL the villages.

I have a friend in the village here, who used to work in one of the fish factories, stuffing anchovies into jars and pouring oil over them, and handling various other fishy products. This friend told me her heart’s deepest secret last week: she dated the love of her life when she was 18 years old, and they were engaged, but his mother refused to let them marry. She insisted a girl who worked in a fish factory could not possibly be a virgin. Whilst my friend was broken hearted, her beau’s mother forced him to marry his own cousin.

“She was fat. I mean vast,” my pretty friend told me in distress, at the climax of her story. “She was a great matress of a woman.”

So, what are the consequences of all this Sicilian inbreeding? Apart from a physique that resembles bedding?

I think we all know inbreeding can produce genetic abnormalities. There has been a case of a baby, whose parents were cousins, born with a single Cyclops eye. The parents were not Sicilians actually, but Arabs, among whom cousin marriage is even more common. In some Middle Eastern countries it accounts for over half of all marriages.

[Arabs have even less opportunity to meet members of the opposite sex socially than Sicilians used to. I wonder how I’d feel as an Arab man, deprived of gratifying female encounters my whole life. I'd be so frantically horny I would be willing to marry almost anyone. Those poor guys!!!! And suddenly I am offered my cousin! That’ll do. Yet I’ve only ever seen her dressed like this:

What does she look like? It's a terrible gamble. Maybe she looks like my aunt???

But crikey!! She might look like my uncle!

(In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, the real reason I am making fun of Arab women is because I have met enough of them to know they are stunningly beautiful, and I’m really quite jealous.) Anyway, now that I’ve finished fooling about with Arabs, let me go back to ridiculing Sicilians.]

Actually no, first let me mock sharks.

This is a real living critter, a cyclops shark found off the coast of California. Click on the photo for the full story.

By the way, the article about the human cyclops baby contains a photo which I have chosen not to reproduce at it is distressing. However I can happily provide a mock-up of the glasses this child may need, should her eye turn out to be short-sighted:

Well, does marrying your cousin, generation after generation, produce cyclopes? In Homeric times, rumour had it that Sicily was inhabited by a whole tribe of cyclopes; one-eyed giants with very low intellects and fairly persistent BO. People routinely discovered cyclops skulls in Sicily right up to recent times.

In 1371, explorer and writer Giovanni Boccaccio reported that he had been present when peasants in Sicily discovered a mighty Cyclops skeleton inside a cave. They dared each other to touch it and, when one eventually plucked up the courage to do so, most of it turned to dust, leaving only three huge teeth, parts of the skull, and a vast thigh bone.

Click on the photo for the original source of this image, which has a hilarious explanation.

Bocaccio, by the way, wrote the rather racy poem “The Decameron,” the Italian answer to the Thousand and One Nights. He had three illegitimate children and one legitimate one, by his first wife, to whom he was married when he was one year old. Poor fellow, perhaps that was the cause of all his lasciviousness? Gradually realizing you’ve been married to some ugly fat “mattress” of a girl since before you could walk or talk. Crikey, maybe she was his cousin too!

An ancient Greek sculpture of Polyphemus, discovered lying about somewhere. In a museum, probably.

Anyway, in the Odyssey of Homer, when Odysseus reaches Sicily, he is caught by a Cyclops named Polyphemus who lives in a cave. Polyphemus likes human flesh, sparkling wine, and sheep. He does not like housework, bathing, or Greeks. He can often be seen dashing men’s brains out “as if they were mere dogs”. By a stroke of sheer jammy good luck, Osysseus happens to have a few good skins of sparkling wine in his ship. So when this one-eyed giant seals off his cave and starts eating Odysseus’ men one by one, Odysseus manages to ply him with champers (Chateau Goat Bladder vintage) and, in his drunken state, blind him and so escape.

A Greek pot showing Odysseus jabbing an inbred Sicilian – not from MY village, from the next one – in the eye.

But the point is, were the cyclopes produced by cousin marriage? I don’t think so! Actually my darling hubby’s parents are cousins. Oh yes, they really are! But hubby is very handsome and I can assure you he has two eyes. They’re not even particularly close together. And although he may not have invented some new theory of physics, he’s jolly good at electrical wiring and plumbing.

What ever would Charles Darwin say about all this exaggeratedly selective breeding? Actions speak louder than words; he married his own cousin too. Other famous dudes who married their cousins include Franklin D. Roosevenlt, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Robin (Winnie the Pooh’s friend from the A.A. Milne books), Samuel Morse (who invented Morse code), H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe and Saddam Hussein. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, some biblical scholars even think that Mary and Joseph were cousins.

As far as I know, all of their offspring had two eyes. So I think the inbred cousin theory of cyclopes doesn’t hold. I think there’s a different explanation.

Six million years ago, the Mediterranean sea did not exist. It had evaporated and turned into a massive salt bed, as the continent of Africa drifted upwards until it crashed into Europe at the West, which is now Spain, and the east, where the Middle East links Egypt with Russia. Sealed off at both ends, the sea became a huge salt lake, which gradually evaporated.

Then suddenly, five and a half million years ago, the Atlantic broke down a huge mass of land and formed the largest waterfall the planet has ever seen. It was not a river, but the ocean itself, pouring over a land mass between Spain and Morocco, and gradually carving out the sea channel that now separates the two continents of Europe and Africa. Eventually, the map of the Mediterranean basin that we know today was laid out. The Islands were formed, including Sicily, and the animals on them were isolated from the mainland. So they started to evolve differently.

What has all this got to do with cyclopes? I really am going somewhere with this, I promise.

In Europe, back then, there were elephants. Elephants eat a LOT of leaves to reach the enormous size which makes them unassailable to pretty much all predators. The Sicilian elephants did not have such a lot of vegetation, and they did not have any predators on the island anyway. So they gradually shrank, till eventually the Sicilian elephant was no larger than a pony. They must have been so cute! I wish I could have one as a pet.

I still don’t know why the old men in Sicily are so titchy, but I suppose that’s a research project for another post…

This is from a photography website with lots of other brilliant size-effects, including a man spreadeagled on an ice-cream cone. Click on this image to visit the site.

The fossils of these dwarf elephants have been found on most of the main Mediterranean islands. They are nearly always found in caves. There are several caves in Sicily where they can be found in great numbers. When you look at their skulls head on, with the tusks fallen off, the hole for their trunk looks rather like a single eye hole. Rather like a Cyclops skull. In a cave called the Grotta dell’Addaura on Monte Pellegrino, in Palermo, a complete little elephant skeleton was found. They have also found cave engravings from the paleolithic and mesolithic eras.

A cyclops skull? Not quite – a mini Sicilian elephant skull instead.

Palaeolithic cave paintings from the Grotta dell’Addaura on Monte Pellegrino, in Palermo, Sicily. Close by, the skeletons of tiny elephants were found.

Well, I think that’s how the legend of the cyclops arose in Sicily. From the skulls of dear little elephants. As to the question of whether the elephants married their own cousins, your guess is as good as mine.

My Sicilian friend’s ex-fiance and his cousin, Materassina, at their wedding

Fabulous elephant wedding cake, which can be ordered in the UK. Click on the image to go to the supplier’s website.

They arrested 21 Mafiosi in my little backwater of a town last week. All of them had been very high profile players in international organised crime.

Along with the 21 arrests, the police also recovered 30 million Euros in cash, buildings, businesses, supermarkets, and other varied loot. The men had been engaged in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnap, illegal arms dealing and rigging elections.

This place is honestly a one-horse town with a tiny population. The most exciting thing that has ever happened here since the Second World War was when local boy and international movie mogul Salvatore Tornatore, who directed Cinema Paradiso, came back for the premiere of his more recent and much more hilarious film, Baaria.

Oh, that and the time some English friends of mine came to visit in February, and their kids decided to go swimming in the sea. I admit it was rather nippy, but it was honestly no colder than the average English summer; yet the locals still reminisce about that from time to time, in a blend of awestruck astonishment and quiet admiration.

So forgive me for being rather gobsmacked to find out that we had such a lot of Mafia bigshots here.

One of the men arrested was the mayor of a nearby town called Alimena, a man called Giuseppe Scrivano. He was a member of the political party called the Lega Nord, which would never get elected in Sicily unless the elections were rigged, because their main policy is to cut Sicily loose and create a new Italy without the primitive peoples of Italy’s incompetent south. Their politicians are regularly to be seen on Italian TV, railing against the Mafia of the south who are “dragging the whole country down”.

All the men arrested were major bosses, organising illegal international arms trading operations on a massive scale as well as drug trafficking, gambling, loan sharking and contract killing. And they all lived within spitting distance of my own house. Yoinks!

And a right crew they looked too. Check out a small sample of the mugshots, if you dare:

When members of the Japanese Mafia mess up, they are punished by being forced to cut off one of their own fingers. The Sicilian Mafia, on the other hand, apparently punish mistakes with a ferocious eyebrow plucking.

(They don’t really. I’m just kidding about that. At least I think I am.)

Two of the men targeted for arrest were part of the Canadian branch of the Sicilian Mafia. They had been tracked and monitored all the way from Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police…

…were working very closely with the Italian Carabinieri…

It’s a good job the Mounties have their own transport, because the Carabinieri in Italy sometimes suffer setbacks like this:

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The two Canadian crooks, being tracked as part of this massive police sting operation, were called Juan Ramon Paz Fernandez and Fernando Pimentel. These names immediately alert you to the fact that they were not of Italian origin. This would have made their admission to Mafia membership a controversial move, and would place them on a risky footing within the organisation. Non-Italians are very much regarded as second-tier associates within Cosa Nostra…. even as far away as Canada.

One interesting snippet that came out of the whole monitoring and sting operation, codenamed Argo, was the revelation of the Cosa Nostra membership initiation rites. It has long been known that joining the Mafia is rather like joining the Freemasons or the Moonies or maybe a US university frat society: they demand utter loyalty and have wierd joining rituals.

New initiates to the Sicilian Mafia have to do the following:

1. Prick your trigger-pulling finger with a thorn from a bitter orange tree (in case you’ve never foolishly tried to climb an orange tree, you’ll have to take it from me that these thorns are two inches long and can pierce human bones); some clans of the Mafia use a golden thorn instead

2. bleed onto a religious picture

3. set the bloody picture on fire whilst holding it in both hands

4. whilst not screaming like a girl because your fingers are getting barbecued, recite an oath of loyalty until death to the Mafia.

The police also learned, from one bugged conversation, that the new initiates who make mistakes are punished by having their legs thrashed with horsewhips. Well, the next time I see a bloke limping along with blood seeping out of his trouser legs and with savagely plucked eyerows, I shall NOT offer to help him across the road. I shall run away as fast as I can, shouting “Ha! ha! You can’t catch me! Thank goodness!”

The Canadian arm of Cosa Nostra has a massive war going on at the moment. Murders are taking place in blockbuster quantities, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, in the struggle for new leadership. These two Spanish-sounding Canadians had decided to forge strong links with the Bagheria branch of Cosa Nostra and increase the amount of drug trafficking between Canada and Italy, in the hope of getting to the top in the Canadian power struggle.

So, how did that work out for them? Did the police manage to arrest them?

No. The mob got to them first. They were found in the local rubbish dump the day before yesterday, shot 30 times each and burnt to black crisps.

Yeuch.

This news even worked its way up to a UK Guardian reporter in Rome yesterday. Maybe my backwater of a home town is going to be famous for something other than two little English girls shivvering in the sea!

And I wish to convey my thanks for making my town a safer place to live, both to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

and to the courageous ROS (anti-Mafia) division of the Carabinieri of Sicily.

Africans are so often portrayed as the underdogs, nowadays, that we sometimes forget they conquered southern Europe twice and ruled it for centuries.

The Sicilians don’t forget, though, for the Africans invented pasta as we know it, shaped their language and gave them the word Mafia, and brought them their citrus fruit trees, taught them to make dazzling coloured ceramics and founded street markets that still flourish like chaotic souks in central Palermo today.

The capo market in Palermo, founded by Africans over 1,100 years ago.

The first wave of Africans were the Carthaginians. Carthage is now Tunis, in Tunisia. They spoke Phoenician, a Semitic language related to Hebrew, and were a cultural and ethnic mix of colonists from Lebanon and indigenous African Berbers. They never ruled Sicily without a fight, but first started founding cities here in the 8th century B.C. and always had a foothold on the island to the 2nd century B.C.

The Romans conquered Sicily eventually, and then later came a second wave of African invaders. By this time they were Muslim and they spoke Arabic, and the Europeans called them Moors. This is a vague term which applies to all the various races of northern Africa, including some sub-Saharan Africans as well. They ruled the Emirate of Sicily from 827 till 1061 A.D.

In Sicily, you see Africa all around you, even if you don’t recognise it.

COUS COUS: Cous cous is a Sicilian staple. In Sicily it is most often eaten with fish. The charming coastal town of San Vito Lo Capo has an annual cous cous festival in June, during which free cous cous is served in the streets for three days. There are also public cous cous making workshops (it’s a very fiddly, iterative process), a cooking tournament, and food markets. Oh yes, the Sicilians do like their food!

FACIAL GESTURES: If you ask a Sicilian a question, he may say nothing, but just tip his head back, look down his nose at you, and make a “tut” noise. English people do this to express disapproval, but when Sicilians do it, it just means “no”. Anyone who has travelled in the Middle East or North Africa will know that the Sicilians learned to do this from Arabic people.

Sicilians are generally the most hand-waving and emotional of all the Italians. A lot of their extremely tactile ways were picked up from the North Africans.

LANGUAGE: The Sicilian language is packed with Arabic words. They are too numerous to list. I’ll give you one, though…

THE WORD MAFIA: The Arabic word mahyas means “aggressive boasting or bragging.” This evolved into the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which means arrogant, with a determination to dominate others through intimidation and bullying. And of course, people who have incorporated this behaviour into their way of life are the Mafia.

PASTA: I bet you didn’t know modern pasta was invented by Africans!

Records of pasta being eaten in Greece and Palestine go back to the 2nd century. It seems to have been widely eaten all around the Mediterranean in ancient times. They made it from flour and water, then boiled and ate it immediately. Italians still occasionally buy fresh pasta like this (pasta fresca) from small, local “pasta laboratories,” as they are amusingly called.

The Carthaginians introduced durum wheat to Sicily in the 8th century BC. It was soon being exported all around the Mediterranean. When the Moors came to Sicily, they realised durum wheat pasta can be dried hard. This makes it highly mould- and insect-resistant for long term storage and transportation. It was ideal for their export business and meant they could charge more for a value-added, ready-to-eat product. It also has the advantage of being ideal for toddlers’ art projects at kindergarten.

They opened large pasta factories in Sicily, particularly in Palermo and Trabia, to mass produce this dried pasta (pasta ascuitta), which is of course pasta as we now know it. In 1154, Mohammad Al-Idrisi wrote: “West of Termini there is a delightful settlement called Trabia. Its ever-flowing streams propel a number of mills. Here there are huge buildings in the countryside where they make vast quantities of itriyya [pasta] which is exported everywhere: to Calabria, to Muslim and Christian countries. Very many shiploads are sent.”

Pasta is still one of Sicily’s major exports. Have you seen Tomasello pasta in your supermarket? That’s made in Sicily, with production in several towns where the Africans first opened pasta factories over 1,000 years ago.

Ahhh! Just like the Africans made it!

I have seen some claims that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, inspired by Chinese noodles. As you now know, this is blatant poppycock. Written records and archaeological evidence prove the Africans were mass-producing it in Sicily centuries before he was born.

CERAMICS: The Africans were experts in multi-coloured ceramic glazing techniques. They brought master craftsmen to establish potteries and train locals in Sicily. They replaced the ancient lead-oxide glazes with tin oxide glazes and added manganese purple and copper green to the color palette.

One of the typical ceramic artifacts they made looked like this, and people in Sicily still make them today:

A “Moor’s Head” vase from Caltagirone; apparently the Africans in those days liked using fruit as hair grips.

Their techniques later spread throughout Italy and the style of pottery was named Maiolica. It is still a major craft in Sicily, especially in Caltagirone, the centre of the Moorish pottery industry in Sicily, and Santo Stefano di Camastra. These two small towns are packed with hundreds of ceramics shops in every street. My husband displays signs of intense panic when I ask him to take me to either of them.

“The kitchen walls are already full,” he protests. “We’ve got no more room.”

ARCHITECTURE: The legacy of the architecture brought over from Africa remains not only in the old buildings that still stand in Sicily, but in the architectural designs and buildings technology that worked their way all through Europe and even up to the medieval cathedral builders of Great Britain.

The baths at Cefala Diana, just south of Palermo, were built by the Moors and look like this:

Ancient baths which still stand in the wild middle of nowhere. You won’t get pestered by rival tourists if you come here.

They were constantly refilled with water from several natural springs. The spring water surged at various different temperatures, a different one for each of the pools.

Palermo Cathedral, which the Africans converted into a mosque, has some Arabic inscriptions on its exterior and examples of Islamic art.

An Arabic plaque which can be seen on the exterior of Palermo cathedral. Can anyone translate it? Answers in the comments box, please!

The Normans who conquered Sicily so greatly admired Moorish architecture that they employed African architects, artists and craftsmen for their buildings. As a result, some of Palermo’s churches look like this:

La Martorana Church in Sicily. Martorana means marzipan, also invented by the Moors, which allegedly the nuns from the neighbouring convent used to sell. The martorana sweet, usually shaped very attractively into fruits, is named after the church, not the other way round, apparently.

And this:

A view of the Arabic garden in the courtyard of Monreale Cathedral.

The Castello di Zisa and La Cuba, also in Palermo, are in pure Fatimid style and surroundeded by Arabic gardens.

PALERMO AND ITS STREET MARKETS: The Carthaginians of Tunisia founded Palermo in 734 B.C. and gave it the catchy name of Zyz. Some of their city walls still survive in the city centre. Then in the 9th century A.D., the North African Moors invaded again, built new neighbourhoods, and filled the town with buzzing street markets that sold local foods and imported products.

Of these, the Capo and the Ballaro’ are still thriving markets with a real chaotic, souk-like vibe. Stall holders and customers alike wave their hands manically, shout their heads off and throw food and stuff all over the place. Your shoes will get wet gubbins on them. Don’t look too closely! It could be fish guts! I have a ridiculously high pair of pole-dancerish looking sandals which I wear for wading through the slurry when I go there to do my shopping.

Sensible footwear for a Sicilian Housewife to go grocery shopping

You can buy fresh fruit and veg, spices, meat or sea food, and eat local delicacies such as a spleen sandwich or a small intestine kebab, freshly cooked in front of you. (When I say small, I mean it’s the small intestine. The kebab is fairly large. As I have already mentioned, Sicilians DO like their food.)

SURNAMES: Arabic surnames survive in Sicily. Salimbeni, Taibbi, Sacca’, Zappala’, Cuffaro and Micicchè are all derived from North African families. They often have the stress on the last vowel, which of course breaks all the rules of pronunciation in Italian.

There is also the name Fricano, which is extremely common in Bagheria where I live and in a few nearby towns. It is pretty easy to tell that this is derived from “African”, the name the Romans gave to Carthaginian Africans who remained in Sicily after the Romans conquered the island. Strangely, though, the Romans also gave this title to several generals of theirs as an honourary additional surname for conquering the Carthaginians in Africa.

CITRUS FRUIT: The North Africans brought citrus trees with them and planted them all over Sicily and particularly in the bay of Palermo, which came to be called the Bay of Gold because of the glowing fruit that filled it. Once the world discovered the cause of scurvy, selling citrus fruits to sailors from all over Europe made Palermo one of the richest cities in Europe.

The Sicilian word for orange blossom – zagara – derives from the Arabic word zahr. Sicilians make the zagara into a beautiful toilet-water type perfume, also invented by the North Africans.

IRRIGATION: The North Africans were experts in irrigation. They used a technique first employed to reclaim the deserts all over Persia (I’m deliberately not saying Iran, because Persia back in those days was much bigger), digging out gradually tilting tunnels under the whole bay of palermo area and lining them with stone. The depth to which the channels were sunk and the subtle gradient gathered water from a wide area and made the Palermo bay into one of Europe’s most fertile farming areas.

A qanat under the bay of Palermo. Bring your wellies.

These tunnels, called Qanats, are sometimes opened to members of the public who have an abnormally high level of resistance to claustrophobia. Before being turned into Sicily’s number one Terrifying Tourist Attraction, they were sometimes used as escape routes by the Mafia, who violently wrestled into ownership of the citrus industry in the 1980s (ruining its profitability), bought houses above the qanats’ entrances, and took control of the extensive network as a means of escaping the police.

PLACE NAMES: Sicily is full of towns with Arabic names. For example:

Marsala, where the wine comes from, is Mars’Allah meaning God’s Port;

Alcamo was founded by the Muslim General Al-Kamuk;

Mislimeri signifies the resting place of the Emir (Manzil-Al-Emir);

Caltagirone, Caltanisseta, Caltabellotta and Caltavuturo derive from the Arabic calta meaning castle;

Tommaso Natale, a place which means “Tommy Christmas,” has nothing to do with the Arabs; I presume it got its name simply because the Sicilians do sometimes just let their sense of humour get the better of them;

Mongibello, Gibilmanna and Gibellina’ stems are all in the mountainous, expressed in the Arabic word gibil;

Regalbuto, Racalmuto and Regaliali derive from rahl, meaning area or village;

Polizza Generosi is a charming mountain town which means “generous policy,” and also has nothing to do with the Arabic speaking Africans, yet I couldn’t resist including it. (It’s policy as in insurance policy. What happens if you crash your car there? Do they give you a new one plus a free motorbike as well?)

CAKES: The Arabs and North Africans sure do love their sugar! The Africans brought sugar cane to Sicily and cultivated it widely, including for export back to Africa. They built sugar refineries which stayed in business till the 17th century, when global sugar production moved over to the West Indies.

The Moors also incorporated it into a famous Sicilian ricotta cheese cake known as qashatah in Arabic, which means “cheesy” and which is now called cassata in modern Sicilian. It is so sugary and fatty that it contains 2,3456,876 calories per bite and is guaranteed to cause type 2 diabetes in under 24 hours or your money back. But look at it! How could you resist?

40% fat cream cheese mixed with sugar, iced with royal fondant icing and covred in candied fruit, topped with sugar icing. Fully compatible with the Atkins diet.

The other type of desert introduced by the Africans was little cakes made from ground nuts. They have no flour, just almond or pistachio flour, egg white and sugar. I’ve recently signed up to a ten-step programme to try to conquer my addiction to them.

CROPS: The Africans imported plants and established crops of almonds, aniseed, apricots, artichokes, cinnamon, oranges, pistachio, pomegranates, saffron, sesame, spinach, sugarcane, watermelon and rice to Sicily. Today, raisins and pine kernels are fundamental to lots of classic pasta and fish recipes.

They also brought in palm trees of all types: short fat pineapple-looking trees, middle sized bushy ones and gigantic date palms, everywhere, date palms! The dates don’t ripen in Sicily because (can this seriously be possible?) the climate isn’t hot enough. I wonder why they brought so many, given that fact. Was it hotter back then? The Sicilian Housewife swoons and chokes for air at the very thought of it. Maybe they were just trying to stave off homesickness. I am not complaining about the date palms, of course. They are beautiful, elegant and often provide an ideal shady patch just the right size to park your car in.

All in all, the Africans brought a great deal to Sicily. A lot of it worked its way up through Italy and spread out into Renaissance Europe.

I sometimes wonder how the modern world might look if the Carthaginians had won the power struggle in the Mediterranean, instead of the Romans. They started out as well-matched empires, so the struggle dragged on for several centuries and Rome only won by a whisker. If Carthage had won, maybe modern America would be populated by brown-skinned people speaking some modern dialect of Phoenician, that Semitic language similar to Hebrew.

My town has 56,339 inhabitants. This morning, when I opened the window, it smelt as if every single one of them had just farted.

This picture comes from a most amusing scientific article all about flatulence. Click on the photo to go to the web page and be educated…

The noxious gases billowed in and tinged the kitchen air a mustardy pea green. The whiff was coming from the local sewage works, whose manager feels that complying with health and safetly regulations is a terrible waste of his money. I estimated I could last 30 seconds before running out of oxygen completely and, clutching my throat in panic, I turned on the air conditioning.

It was the first time I had used it this summer, and nobody had washed the filters yet. Out flew a couple of kilogrammes of dust and approximately 7 million dustmites.

I ran up to the bedroom zone and stayed there for ten minutes, breathing deeply of the invigorating smell of “teenage boy”. (My son is only seven but they grow up fast these days. Also, he has a congenital foot cheese problem. He can’t help it, it’s glandular.)

“What a terrible pong of broken glass,” my Welsh grandfather used to say when someone let out a bum quack. Or he would wrinkle his brow. “Now there’s a nasty whiff of wire bending.”

Apparently all the Welsh coal miners used euphemisms like that. A fart in a coal mine is most unwelcome, of course. It won’t exactly get carried away on the breeze. Apparently, a really bad one could linger down there FOR DAYS AT A TIME.

Sicilians are fart conoisseurs, and they’re not as coy as Grandapa was. The Sicilian language has different words for different types. A sgureggiu is the ninja type, silent but deadly; A pirittu is the show-off variety, rattlingly loud; after doing a luffione you have to rush off and change into fresh underwear. You get the idea.

A Japanese nose peg – apparently for beautification rather than surviving The Smells of Sicily. Click on the image to order, if you feel you need one.

After a while I decided to re-test the outside air, so I opened the window a crack. This time my nostrils were assailed by an acrid cloud of smoke from burning car tyres and possibly a chemical fire. This smell came from a local entrepreneur, who has opened up a business accepting old tyres and other industrial waste from far and near, for a fee which undercuts the local council. It crossed my mind that he was lucky not to explode in a giant fireball, considering the dense clouds of methane that were billowing all around town. By this time I had gone into industrial phenol-induced bronchospasm and only just got the window catch down before slipping to the floor. I may have suffered a small amount of brain damage.

I decided to just leave everything closed at that point, and get my son ready for school as fast as humanly possible.

“No you don’t really need breakfast today. Hurry up!”

“It’s OK, you don’t have to brush your teeth today. Chop chop!”

“Alright, you can eat the toothpaste if you’re hungry. Just get your shoes on!”

Eventually, he innocently asked me:

“Mummy, have you done a wooftie? It’s very whiffy in here.”

“No darling, it wasn’t me. Ok, you can go to school without your shoes on. Let’s GO!”

All I wanted was to get away from this Little House of Smells and make my way to somewhere I could actually inhale oxygen.

I drove all the way with the window tightly shut and then, when we reached the school, I realised I simply was NOT going to breathe today. At all.

For this is what I found parked opposite my son’s educational establishment:

You can imagine what that smells like in the Sicilian heat. It was buzzing with a milion mosquitoes and flies. I’ve no doubt there were cockroaches and rats in its deeper strata.

Driving home after abandoning my poor little boy to his fate, I saw that this wasn’t just one horrible spot. There were mountains like this at intervals along every street in town. I am sorry to say that modern technology does not, as yet, allow me to convey the smell of e. coli- and shigella-induced decomposition to you through cyberspace… though it’s so potent that, if you open your window wide, you may just catch a whiff of it wherever you live, borne on the wind.

After a stomach-turning wait at the traffic lights, I was pulling out round a heap of rubbish and suddenly it started to seethe and shift: about 100 plastic bags of stink had buried a parked car overnight, whose owner had somehow excavated his way through it to the driver’s seat and decided to take off out of it, like a zombie emerging out through the mud of his grave.

In some roads there were refuse-related traffic jams, where a two-way street was reduced to a single lane and the vehicles travelling in each direction had to take turns to get through the bottle neck.

If you could see under the particularly large mound at the far side of that photo above, you would know that there are three recycling bins under there. When they first appeared, some idealistic and delusional people, myself for example, happpily separated their rubbish. Then we noticed that the bin men tip everything into the same lorry, mixing it all back up again. After that, we started putting our old squashed bits of cannoli into the glass recycling bin and uneaten tangles of spaghetti in the plastic one. What the heck!

Yeah, this is what happens when your town mayor outsources refuse collection to a company that is actually Mafia Incorporated. We pay among the highest rate of taxes for refuse collection in Europe, and the refuse stays where we leave it. Where does our money go? It pays colossal salaries to Mafiosi who have got out of prison, and are employed as refuse collectors. There are so many of them that we almost have enough for one bin man to every 30 citizens, and their salary is Euros 50,000 a year – that is over US $60,000. And they don’t actually collect the refuse.

My husband got hold of a copy of the refuse collection contract. It says the council must pay the refuse collection company’s employees’ salaries, whether or not the refuse is actually collected and taken away. It also says that the refuse collection company will decide unilaterally how many employees it needs to hire, in order to not collect the rubbish.

I took this picture recently while taking an evening stroll along the sea front. The sign says “It is STRICTLY forbidden to throw rubbish here.” …..Ah, these Sicilians!

Last year, the new town mayor tried to cancel the contract signed by the previous mayor and was quite seriously beaten up, so he backed down and continued paying.

You may think “fair enough”, but I don’t. If you stand for election in Sicily, at any level, you KNOW this danger is part of the job. You KNOW you may have to get a 24 hour armed escort for yourself and your family, if you do the right thing and govern honestly. And you get paid a truly colossal salary for your pains.

The mayor of a tiny town like mine is paid a small fortune. By the time you go up to the members of the national parliament in Italy, most of whom are responsible for a region with less than 200,000 inhabitants, the salary is more than Barack Obama earns. Check that on Google if you don’t believe me.

Some members of the public resort to setting fire to the heaps of rubbish. This is of course dangerous, not only because the fires could spread, but because the burning rubbish releases highly toxic gases into the atmosphere. Yet what else are you supposed to do when you cannot get through your own driveway because there are about 14 tonnes of plastic bags in front of it, full of used nappies, food packaging and rotting fish heads? And are the rats and cockroaches that swarm in and out of the rubbish heaps any less of a public health hazard than the noxious gases produced by burning them?

The town tayor, on the town council’s website, denouced people who set fire to the rubbish as “vandals.” Am I the only one who thinks the concept of “vandalising rubbish” is funny?

Rubbish burning in Bagheria last week. Hold your breath!

The remains of burnt rubbish. There will be a new mountain of rubbish here by tonight…

Well, is there a silver lining to this cloud?

Besides the rubbish crisis, we have an economic crisis too. I have started seeing people picking through the rubbish on the streets lately. Every time I drop my son at school, there is someone there, having a look for anything that could be useful; you never see more than one person (unless they are gypsies), as any Sicilian would find it too humiliating to be found in this activity, so they vanish when they see someone they know.

So, the people with money throw stuff away, then the really poor people take it home and use it all over again. That’s recycling, Sicilian style. How ecological!

Recycling, Sicilian style: this photo is from the Bagheria Council’s official website, which explains that all the mountains of rubbish are here because the Bin men are on strike

I attended a vehicular funeral last week.

My friend Totò, a bright-eyed and sprightly septuagenarian, had a maroon Alfa Romeo which was, basically, made of sticky tape. I don’t mean trashy thin stuff, I mean the top quality wide, brown parcel kind.

By the time I had seen his car enter the final, declining years of its life, that brown parcel tape was holding the doors on, it was fixing the windscreen in (which was made of transparent polythene), it was wound all round the middle of the car going over the roof and under the undercarriage, it was holding the rear bumper on (at one side, anyway) and it was even securing the hubcaps.

Once the car became afflicted with ‘failure to thrive’, the driver’s seat was upholstered in a solid sheet of sticky tape strips, patchwork style, with no trace of the original leather to be seen. The vehicle had no number plates near the tragic end, I think because Totò must have run out of tape before he got to them.

NOT WHAT TOTO’S ALFA ROMEO LOOKS LIKE

I am running ahead of myself, though. I must introduce our friend, Signor Totò.

Signor Totò works at the village’s small Town Hall. The town hall in the village is so small that Signor Totò is the only person who works there. I am deliberately excluding the fat lady at the entrance who swats flies away and asks you your name, then sits there not telling Totò, and just waves you through to his office. She is there, yes, but you could not say that she works.

Totò was the first friend I made in Sicily, independently of my husband. He is one of the few men in the village who is not a fisherman. He is related to every other person in the village and they tease him about his famous namesake, for Signor Totò has the same name and surname as a recent President of Sicily, who governed the island for two years while on trial for being in the Mafia. He was sentenced to five years in prison but decided not to stand down as president immediately, instead declaring he would continue his full term of government and go to jail afterwards.

Whilst it is impossible for anyone outside Sicily to imagine how this could possibly be possible, here it merely provokes a day of grumbling and some groans of irritation, like the “Here we go again” groans of weary irritation on the London Underground when commuters are told their train has been taken out of service because there is a terrorist bomb on it.

Whilst our Town Hall is small, it resides in part of a sprawling, late seventeenth century villa. The only structurally sound part, in fact.

The facade boasts twin marble staircases which curve outwards and upwards in grandiose, once-magnificent semicircles and unite at the main entrance on the first floor. This is the classic design of the Sicilian baroque villa and it is always a terrible dilemma choosing which staircase to walk up, because they are both so badly cracked and crumbling that either one of them could suddenly give way beneath you and leave you with a sprained ankle and a broken nose.

“What if I go up this one and break some bones, when I could have used that one and been safe one more time?” one ponders anxiously at the foot of the staircases.

All the other offices in the building are so badly flooded, when it rains, that it is like a monsoon indoors, Totò told me. That is why his office is the only room in the building that is used any more.

“Why don’t they restore it?” I asked. “This building could be stunning if they fixed the corners back on.”

“They’ll wait until a piece falls on someone and they get sued, then they’ll do something. Until then, they won’t spend a Euro on it,” he told me.

I like to walk whenever the weather is decent, so I am often to be seen pottering about the vilage. Totò is most gentlemanly and always offers me a lift if he passes me on foot. He drives very slowly and safely.

Last week, I was caught out in an unexpected shower of light rain. My hero Signor Totò came to the rescue.

“Would you mid draping the seat belt across your body?” he asked as I settled into the passenger seat. “I know there’s nothing for it to click into, but at least it looks OK if the vigili urbani (traffic police) are checking. I’ve been bossing them around a bit too much lately, so they’re looking to get their own back. There are a couple who are not nephews of mine, so I can’t really keep them under control. They all know this car last passed its MOT nine years ago.”

We exchanged the usual pleasantries, then Totò suddenly said,

“I must apologise for going so slowly. My wife thinks I’m a cowardly driver, but I can’t risk getting up too much vibration. It heats up the bodywork and melts the glue, so the tape unravels.”

While we rolled along, chillaxing at 12 miles per hour, a car approached which was rather like a go-kart, in that it had no bodywork other than the absolute essentials. I think it was composed of pieces from at least five different types of Fiat, judging by the range of colours and the fact that the parts did not fit together particularly well. It was at least 80% rust.

“Cor, look at that heap of junk!” laughed Signor Totò, stepping on the accelerator and shooting up to almost 20 mph in a sudden surge of confidence. “How embarrassing to be seen in such an old banger!”

TOTO’S CAR REPAIR KIT

As we passed the x-ray go-kart, we realised its exhaust pipe was scraping along the road releasing sparks like a firework. It made a tinny noise, as if the driver and passenger were newlyweds and the scrap metal they were towing behind them had been tied on by their scallywag friends.

And that, my friends, was the fateful moment.

There was a dire ‘clonk’ noise from somewhere down below us, and Signor Totò and I exchanged glances. We both knew something terrible had happened to his vintage Alfa Romeo. Totò pulled over and we jumped out: His exhaust pipe was lying in the road, several metres behind us, trailing probably not less than 20 miles of tangled, sticky brown tape in its wake. Smoke was billowing out from under the bonnet. Finally, there was a decisive ‘Poff’ noise, and the engine cut out.

That was when we both knew: the end had come.

“My dear old Alfa Romeo,” said Totò, like a priest delivering the last rites, “you have served me well these past twenty-three years, but henceforth I will save a fortune in sticky tape. We must now part company for ever. Che liberazione! Good riddance!”