this is what i get

for not speaking Italian.


Damn. Damn. Damn.

what, no skull-shaped bong?

When learning a new language, it helps to have specific goals to work toward. At the moment, I am composing an occasional address to my new landlords, to be delivered on the day when I drop off my key at the end of my lease. I am still tweaking it, but it will go something like this.

Landlords:

I despise you with the intensity of a thousand suns. I hate your preppy spiky hair and your interminable small talk and your bovine gum-chewing. I hate you for telling me I could paint over your tasteless, knotty-pine-panelled walls (I don’t like my home to stare back at me, thank you) and then changing your minds. I execrate you for being the only landlords in this town too tight-fisted to provide basic kitchenware. I revile the ancient washing machine you provided that flooded my bathroom. I challenge you to sleep one night on that feral tesselation of rusted springs you have the temerity to call a mattress.

May your children's children be born with tails.


It's good to have projects. In the meantime, though, I find I am starting to get fond of the place. It’s a good size and it's on the top floor. The glass in the exterior door is cracked all over, but the door does lead out onto a vast, private roof terrace. The terrace is almost certainly made out of asbestos, and sags alarmingly, but if you walk on the joists, you’re set. The tap water leaves a burning sensation in your mouth, but there is unlimited free heating.

Even the paneled walls are kind of adorable. Somebody actually chose them, and that is touching. It’s like a sleepover in your dad’s den, only you get to stay there every night. Most people who’ve seen the place suggested in wobbly voices that a few Impressionist prints would cheer it up no end. Belligerent B proposed some pictures of smoking dogs playing pool, and a chenille bedspread, which is rather closer to the mark.

I’m living in a Martin Parr photograph.

got my head checked

Okay, yes, people have started razzing me for that spurious twice-a-week claim, so at least I know somebody is checking up on me. I spent the weekend in Brescia and Bergamo with my mate Flavio. We saw Roman mosaics and medieval church frescoes. My favourite was the disembodied midsection of San Sebastian—the stucco had come off the wall in patches, leaving only his little pot belly and a loin cloth that looked very much like a pair of saggy y-fronts, all stuck through with arrows. We ate gnocchi with blue cheese, apple and chestnuts in a hilltop trattoria, and toast with nutella in the hostel breakfast room, watched by a pair of piranhas. It’s not every day you see a fish tank with a big yellow and black ‘danger’ sign on it. If you want to know what piranhas look like, they look like fat, sullen bastards.

Best of all, we saw a huge exhibition of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It had examples of their earliest work, through to the Arles and Tahiti paintings. I’ve never really thought about these artists that much. I started out in that complacent, drowsy “afternoon at the gallery” zone. I wasn’t expecting to see so clearly the development of—what can I call it? The word vision has been hijacked by car advertisements. If they were writers, I would call it a voice—and that was the real jolt of it, to see what I haven’t been able to see before in the work of visual artists: a shining, singular consciousness, the mind of the auteur.

Both of them struggling through high Impressionism (yuk, those stifling canvases full of figures cut in half by screens, cows straining through fences to reach water, figures dissolving in nauseous pointillist dots…) on their way to finding their own visual languages. Van Gogh’s colours dissolving in light, full of tenderness. Those self-portraits, where his left eye is looking straight at you, but the right is gazing softly out of the frame, as if he was seeing two realities at once—two differently-visible worlds. Gauguin’s colours, on the other hand, condensing in to obsessive blocks of pigment that hover over the canvas and do strange things to your head.

Both of them wanting to get at the core of things—not rendering them as they look, but as they are. Placing consciousness at the centre, but not consciousness as a recorder of sense impressions—rather as a desiring, wondering, knowing thing. Both gnostics in their different ways. They so desperately wanted us to understand. For god’s sake, the answer’s in that distant-gazing right eye—not in a mutilated ear. Skip the gift shop and the tut-tut pop psych. Just look, and look, and look, and try to see.

hemingway felt this tired

I've been working sixty hour weeks. The problem with a new business is everybody gets the burn out at the same time, and they all start talking in strained and long-suffering voices, and opening conversations with such red rags as: 'Katrina, could you do me a favour?' Yes, almost certainly, but your chances will be better if you avoid prefaces like that.

There is, however, a world outside the office. In it, I have recently seen:

A very, very small child with a very, very large umbrella. Looking a lot like a toadstool, if toadstools wore gumboots.

Persimmons glowing like little suns on leafless, rain-blacked branches.

Bicycle lamps through the poplars and the gathering fog as I ride the path along the river at the end of day.

A puppet show. Where I work, this is called research. So my job is still classifiable as good-to-excellent. I am starting a reading group for bilingual boys soon. I'm thinking Paul Jennings, Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, Gillian Rubenstein. What do you get for the kid whose voice hasn't broken, but who has already completed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?

And I have played coin soccer, coin rugby and a Spanish card game I don't know the name of. And pictionary with an Italian word deck and a Swede, a Spaniard, a Belgian, a Brit and a Sicilian. There were four dictionaries on the table at once, and loud maledictions in as many languages, but we did get words like 'regatta', 'suburbia' and 'infiltrate'.