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Find of the month: cheap phone centre that sells ten kinds of beer, cheap. I foresee a lot of international phone calls that tail off into uh LUHV ya, man. Nah nah nah. Nah. Nah, man—uh luhv YOO.


Media moments of the month: Loveline, the five-nights-a-week talkshow dedicated to informing youth that the rhythm method doesn’t work and that foreplay isn’t a golf term, tells us that a new carpark has opened in Bari. It offers individually screened-off parking spaces and charges for an initial half-hour and in quarter-hour increments thereafter. Do Italians live at home too long? You be the judge.

The local national paper (I’m not quite sure how that works) boasts that Italian women are the ‘hottest’ in Europe, based on what percentage of women in a nation are having sex at least once a week (In Italy it’s about 59), and that the most ‘frigid’ are the neighbouring Austrians. I suspect, though that the Austrians might not be constrained to shampoo their carseats so frequently.

Pretty much everyone except the pope wants to decriminalise euthanasia. The pope doesn’t care. Berlusconi, blocking law reforms for de facto couples in parliament, describes de facto relationships as ‘marriage: serie b’. Australia features twice: once with a story of a man who wrestled a shark, and when asked why, replied: 'I was drunk'; and once in an article on the drug Stilnox, which apparently has people getting up in their sleep to run in circles around the living room, binge eat and repaint their doors. Why did no one tell me about this?


New spiritual home: Tequila Wellness Centre. I haven’t visited yet, but just gazing on the promotional leaflet, with its calorific orange block-capitals, suffuses me with a sense of wellbeing.

New actual home: small and perfectly-formed apartment in fifteenth-century palazzo in historic centre, freshly reno’d and ready for me to scratch, grease-mark and spill coffee all over. It’s got white plaster walls and vaulted ceilings in exposed brick, so it’s sort of like living inside a very chi-chi pizza oven. I went to Ikea on Sunday and the pleasure was so intense I almost left my body. Having studied the catalogue at such length that I was starting to hallucinate furniture everywhere (true story: I looked at a husky dog in the street and thought, flokati-upholstered piano stool—genius!) I was primed for maximum efficiency. Elbowing through dithering crowds, testing with my very own behind a selection of kitchen chair covers, choosing with authority the perfect oak-look mini bookshelf, rejecting superfluous picture frames and candles. I don’t care what fantastical objections this landlord might cook up: if he tries to turf me out before my contract is finished, I’m going to go all Charlton Heston on his arse. There’s a rag rug. Theres a wicker chair. There’s emotional investment, is what I’m trying to stay. Move again? Nuh-uh. I'm staying, dude. I'm finishing my coffee.