An exercise in concision

Awright fiends!

How are you on this fine day? Good I trust.

I was doing a lesson earlier, preaching the merits of concision and clarity in emails, a golden rule that first-time readers may be dismayed to find I don't apply to myself. As the saying goes: do as I say, not as I do.

It has been drawn to my attention that in my last post I may have waffled on, with no Belgains in sight. I therefore apologise from the bottom of my being if you came here expecting some kind of revelatory epiphany. I am not your man for that. If, on the other hand you have time to kill and no great interest in broadening your horizons, pull up a figurative pew, sit back, and relax, and let hunners of words wash through your brain like rice through a sieve with holes that are slightly too large for the job at hand.

Since last you heard from me, summer has exploded into life-sucking oppressive heat. As anyone who knows me knows, I'm not one to grumble, but jeeeeeesus, it's too hot to be gadding about in this. Normally I would schadenfreudically console myself that folks back home would be shivering in their thermals, but I see from the news that even in normally-reliably cold Scotland it's warm. Curse you weather! It'd better stay like that in August, otherwise I shall be forced to shake my fist and shout at the wind.

But yes, summer has arrived, and I'm once more forced back under the yolk of shirt-ironing. Despite being a naturally domesticated chap, I find ironing shirts to be such a massive pain in the posterior that I positively enjoy winter and it's jumper-requiring chill. This way, I only have to iron the collar. But nothing lasts forever, and with the changing of the season comes the tyranny of the iron. Oh, how I suffer!

As noted last time around, I've been here five years now, and so I was thinking if I'd had any realisations or discoveries that would be worth mentioning. I think you'll probably come to the conclusion that I've not:

• I assumed all Italians would be good at football. I realise this to have been an error as glaring as the fouls they simulate. I've talked about playing footy with Patrick and his pals before, I think, but it merits saying again: "Jesus wept!" Some of them could teach Scotland a thing or two about perfecting the 'second touch needing to be a tackle' technique.
• As a child, my enquisitive mind was too busy with Games Workshop stuff for me to wonder about what language animals speak. Now that I've broken away from the seductive teet of Dwarves, Goblins and Ultra Marines, I've come to the yet-to-be scientifically lauded understanding that animals speak both English and Italian. Let's examine the facts: my parents' dog responds to English. The roving packs of dogs here prick up their ears when shouted at in Italian. I rest my case. It must be added that they sometimes look at me more blankly than normal when I speak at them in English, but I imagine the animals are simply feigning ignorance, a la Parisian waiters who are said to do this when confronted by non-surrender monkeys.

After all that, I've been thinking that rather than just challenging myself to test your collective patience, I should maybe try to include some of the lowdown on here about Genoa and Italy, and the current situation in the land of the sun. So, as a trial, here's episode one of the series:

"Che cavolo succede!?" (which, very literally translated would be"What the cabbage is going on?!")

Don Gallo, a popular old priest died recently, to much hulla-baloo. By all accounts he was a diamond geezer and seemed to very much be a man of the people. He also smoked cigars and supported Genoa, which on my admittedly poor judge of character-o-meter, means he was top. I went to a free gig a few weeks ago in Piazza De Ferrari to see Paula Turci sing, and she name-checked both Don Gallo and Fabrizio De Andre, which probably accounted for the easiest rounds of applause she's receieved in her performing career.

Elsewhere, the finest and oldest football team in the land (one of these is true), the glorious Genoa CFC have moved and revamped their museum. They decided in their infinite wisdom to translate many of the explanatory panels into English, and to do this they selected the handsomest and most modest young buck they could find. Sadly, he was busy, so instead I did it. As it's a museum, my actions in the present truly will echo on in eternity, or whatever the line was from 300.

And that's more or less it. Of course other things have happened, but I was chased away from the newsagent's stand before I could finish reading the front page - apparently it wasn't a library, so that'll have to do you.

Until next time, buy buy!

Don't call it a comeback

Ciao ragazzi!

Just when you thought it was safe to go back onto t'internet, the US are found out to be mining your activities, and I write a blog. Truly a bad week.

It's been almost a year since my last brain dump on here, so I apologise for either a) being away so long, or b) coming back (delete as applicable). But, as seasoned Michael acolytes (or 'Mich-olytes', I think will not catch on) will know, in my last post I put up a video of a song, which for purposes of explaining my absence, will explain my absence. Frankly, it has been a year of drugs, women, booze, international headlining tours, dreams and more drugs*. It's been so hedonistically rock'n'roll that I can remember none of it, and it seems that The Man have deemed my burning light to have burned so bright that He has deleted almost all record of it from t'internet. Furthermore, He has scurrilously wiped my brain and replaced it with more humdrum memories of work and general pottering. Gah, The Man strikes again!

In truth, I have been meaning to sit down and do something for a few months, but as the French may or may not say, "I just haven't been arsed". It must also be said that I've been meaning to do many things in life, for example: stop smoking; pay my student loan; write a serious blog; develop a greater motivation and determination to do things. But it seems that no matter how much I close my eyes and hope for an effort free arrival at those objectives, I just always end up reading about football instead.

So, yeah, it's been ages, and I thought it'd be about time I write something to mark two significant milestones in my life. In April, Death's cold bony fingers tightened their grip on my shoulders, as I entered my fourth decade on your planet. Various old farts had suggested that I'd start to reconsider my life and make decisions and other things that adults do, and despite much pfffing and dismissal on my part, they may have a point. Decision number one: instead of fannying about with roll-ups, I'm just going to smoke pipes from now on. I've also been dipping my toe into the world of whisky, but one of my friends insists this is not the best way to drink it, so I've also been pouring it down my throat. Although he's Italian, he seems to be on to something.

Another significant marker of time passed just last week, and that was my fifth anniversary of landing on these shores. Without wanting to do a crappy sitcom-style flashback montage, I've seen and done many crazy things here. Do you remember when Monica got a turkey stuck on her head and I had to pull it off?! Hilarious tom-foolery, but no, I don't remember it either. And the same time it seems both incredibly far away, and yet also very close since I got here, but then a common criticism is that I'm not very good with perspective. To think, this time five-ish years ago, I was just a lightly tattooed, pasty larvae without a sense of myself, any knowledge of the language, or any clue as to what I was doing. Fast forward to today, and............................... now I have more tattoos (boom boom!). That is progress!

This milestone has led me to dive deep down through the layers of football and cymbal-banging monkeys in my brain, to examine the blackened core of my being and to ask the Big Questions: Who am I? How did I get here? Where am I going? What am I doing? And most pertinently, why do I keep on spiking my own drinks?

I still haven't arrived at any answers, but I'll be sporting a deerstalker, magnifying glass and substance abuse habit and searching out the answers to these riddles in Edinburgh this summer.

In the last year, I'm sure stuff's happened, and just last night when I was lying in bed thinking about this, I became certain that something noteworthy happened in January, but I just can't remember what it was. I'm sure it was kerrazy-fun though, and emminently readable. In brief, Genoa are crap, the weather's been humpty this year, and I found a shop in Siena called 'Fanny', which I'm entering into a legal dispute with over false advertising under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Oh, in the highly unlikely event that you're neither a blood relative, nor a friend of mine on Facebook, it would be remiss of me not to plug my Bandcamp page, here, or my Youtube here. If you're either a blood relative or a friend on Facebook, you should probably look anyway, come to think of it.

Until next year probably, chow!


*Only one of these is true