No time

(My daughter's decorations made with felt and other recycled materials)

No time for anything. Time has passed so quickly from the beginning of autumn and now we are almost at the end of the year. I would have like to shared a lot more things with you before Christmas, but tomorrow (actually today! HELP!) I'm leaving for Italy and I realize there is no time left. The snow has caught me unprepared today and hopefully we will manage to get to the airport and catch our flight tomorrow (or today, whatever!) on time. I wish you all of you a wonderful Christmas together with your families and friends. I won't wish you a Happy New Year yet as I will be back home before then. All the best. Ciao.

Life is a bitch

The other evening I came home from work in a terrible mood. I had a stressful day. Nothing went the right way. My train was late both ways, I couldn’t find the test centre for my interpreting assignments and I got totally wet running around in circles, the candidates weren’t prepared so they didn’t pass the tests (although not my fault, it was still a bit upsetting). My son lost the house keys and my husbands forgot to pick up my daughter from football training etc etc. When I got home I was ready to explode and then it happened. My husband told me that our neighbour and friend whom we’ve known for 15 years had just discovered he has pancreatic cancer, probably not operable anymore. He’s 51 years old, he’s got a teenage boy and another son who’s just started working. He’s never smoked, took drugs, drank heavily or had an unhealthy lifestyle. He is actually quite sporty and is always been helping everybody. A nice person. His wife left him and the kids 18 months ago to go and live with someone else. Nobody knows exactly where she is now. She’s never got in touch with them again. On the surface she was the perfect wife and mother but deeper she was a different person. We spent the last 18 months trying to help him picking up the pieces of his life and now this. I know I do not need to tell you this, but I say it anyway: Life is a bitch. Awful and unjust.

Slow Down

In this very frenetic and hectic world, everybody needs to slow down a bit every now and then and this is what an arty group called the Cracking Art Group thought of to visualize this idea.

Twelve enormous pink snails have moved in to Milan city centre for a new outdoor art installation designed to encourage the fast-living residents of the Lombardy capital to slow down. Three metres long and two metres high, the huge molluscs are currently circling Piazza Scala in front of Milan's famous opera house, La Scala, and the nearby square in front of the Chiesa di San Fedele.

(Photos taken by my friend Giusy in Milan)

After their time spent “at the opera”, the snails will start moving (slowly of course!) towards the square in front of Milan's Palazzo Reale before making their way in single file to the central train station in January.

Stop Aids. Keep the Promise

1st December - World AIDS Day - "Universal Access and Human Rights"

Held on December 1st each year, World AIDS Day is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV. World AIDS Day is about raising money, increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. It reminds us that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

Every 15 seconds someone in the world dies of AIDS-related illnesses, but even more often a person living with HIV is discriminated against, judged, excluded, whispered about, fired from their job, arrested, beaten, or thrown out of their house.

The red ribbon is an international symbol of AIDS awareness that is worn by people all year round and particularly around World AIDS Day to demonstrate care and concern about HIV and AIDS, and to remind others of the need for their support and commitment.

There is no one official AIDS ribbon manufacturer, and many people make their own. It's easily done - just use some ordinary red ribbon and a safety pin!

In these chaotic and busy weeks/days pre-Christmas, I only wish silence and peace. I've just remembered a few lines from a poem written by one of my favourite poets, Federico Garcia Lorca, and I think it goes well with the above photo taken in my beloved Italian countryside last October.

(extract)

Listen, my child, to the silence.
An undulating silence,
a silence that turns valleys and
echoes slippery,
that bends foreheads toward the ground.


Oye, hijo mío, el silencio.
Es un silencio ondulado,
un silencio, donde resbalan valles
y ecos y
que inclina las frentes hacia el suelo.

(Federico Garcia Lorca)

For the love of ...

…my son I went to a football match for the first time in my life. I mean, a proper football match, not one of my son’s or daughter’s usual Saturday games. It was part of his 16th birthday present and his father was supposed to take him. But unfortunately (and conveniently) last Tuesday evening daddy was late or stuck in traffic (or both?) and it was up to me to take over this duty.


I was actually feeling rather unwell and I was hoping that being the evening so cold my son would desist too. But then I remembered a post I had read in lovely Jane’s blog The Small Fabric Of My Life about creating good memories for our children and I decide to take him. After all, it was only Leeds and there was too much to drive.

Covered with 5 layers of clothing there I was among shouting and chanting fans. My son’s favourite team lost but it was a good match (so he said at least!) and to tell the truth I quite enjoyed it. Or maybe I just enjoyed a bit of bonding with my very demanding teenage son.

Tear Down the Wall

(Checkpoint Charlie now)

I was already studying in Germany when Ronald Reagan made his famous speech in Berlin, on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate (for years the city's symbolic dividing line) on the occasion of the city's 750th birthday urging the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. It seemed just as utipic at the time as it had been the idea of walking on the moon before 1969. I had stood many times in front (or behind) the Brandenburg Gate wondering what it would have been like if the two Berlins had finally come together.

I had crossed the borders at Checkpoint Charlie or at Berlin Friedrichstrasse many times to meet an East Berlin author I was writing my dissertation about. The contrast between West and East Berlin had always seemed huge to me. Walking the few meters into the East side was like walking through a time machine, like leaving the modern age behind and stepping into the past. The contrast was striking, almost unbelievable. I used to “smuggle” writing paper over the border. Can you imagine? A rather famous writer who couldn’t find writing paper and was forced to write on pieces of scrap paper. But that was only a small need compared to what every Berliner felt every day. Like open-air prisoners.

(Irgendwann fällt jede Mauer. Eventually every wall falls)

Twenty years have passed since that night when the wall was brought down. I wasn’t in Berlin that night, but about 100 miles away and when the TV images started showing I couldn’t believe my eyes. The impossible dream had come true. All of a sudden thousands and thousands of East Germans finally could move freely in the “other” Germany and I hoped that one of my East Berliner friends could also come over. He wanted so much to see Italy and especially Venice. But the year before that November 1989 he had been caught by the border police while hiding in the boot of a French car somewhere in Hungary.



Last time his family and friends heard from him he was stuck in a prison in East Berlin. When the wall fell and the political dissidents were freed he wasn’t there. Nobody knew where he was. No papers about him could be found, it was as he had never been there. And nobody knows where he is now. I still hope he’s somewhere travelling around the world as he always wanted to do.

That’s why I’d like to dedicate this memorable day to you, lieber Karsten, wherever you are. I hope you've finally found your freedom.