When not to visit Italy

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Buondì.

Monday morning I nipped out to the pasty shop, down the road from my parents home in Cornwall, to make sure I’d have something to eat on the four and a half hour train journey back to London. But it was closed. So on the rather crowded train I ate half a packet of nuts and drank water, neither of which really helped pass the time.

Arriving at London’s Paddington Station (named after the famous bear, isn’t that cute) having passed through the machines controlling access to the platform, there – facing me – was a pasty shop! This because Paddington (the station not the bear) is the arrival point for trains from the South West. I guess there’s demand from hungry Cornish people arriving in the smoke. Last pasty before the border, fill up here!

Unfortunately the West Cornwall Pasty Company‘s Paddington Station outlet was shuttered, just like the shop I’d been relying on first thing that morning. Sigh.

I finally got to eat something at around six p.m. at the Gowlett Arms pub in Peckham Rye. It’s famous for its pizza, apparently, though I didn’t even consider trying one, which could have been a mistake. A bag of salt and vinegar crisps wasn’t much of a foundation for the several pints of Stan’s Chedddar Valley cider which slipped down almost without me noticing.

My daughter and her partner had narrowed-down dinner options to nearby places that wouldn’t require too much walking to. But when, over the last pint of cider, they pulled out their smartphones to check, both the Mexican and the Indian were closed.

We finally ended up at a ‘vegan fish and chip shop’, run by a guy from Northern Cyprus and his Turkish partner. I stammered out a few phrases in Turkish, which pleased them to the extent that we each were offered a glass of Jamaican rum on the house. Which pleased us. Never before have I seen a fish and chip shop with shelves of spirits behind the counter, as is typical in pubs and bars around the world. It’s a Cyprus thing, apparently.

So then, why did everything appeared to be closed in England on Monday? Turns out that May 4th this year was the ‘Early Spring Bank Holiday’, a description which – unlike Italy’s recent ‘festa della liberazione’ on April 25th (down with the Germans!) or May first’s ‘festa del lavoro’, known elsewhere as International Workers’ Day, (down with the bosses!) – sounds neither traditional nor particularly stirring.

Britain, which according to Napoleon Bonaparte was a nation of shopkeepers – these days shoplifters – doesn’t celebrate its toiling masses, though it does allow them the occasional Monday off, to get rained on on a Cornish beach or other damp location of their choice.

Anyway, to the point: before you visit Italy, Britain, or wherever is foreign to you, you’d be well-advised to do what I failed to do and check for national (and in Italy also local) holidays. Or take a packet of nuts, to be on the safe side.

In Britain maybe also avoid school holidays, especially ‘half-terms’, which fall on unpredictable dates and tend to make travelling more stressful and expensive.

Italian schoolchildren don’t have ‘half-term’ holidays, but consider avoiding August instead, when much of Italy is not only unbearably hot but also devoid of Italians. They’ll all have gone to London, to escape the heat and to complain about the food. In August Italy is basically closed, except for the beach resorts and tourist-trap cities like Venice, Florence, and – to an extent – Rome.

N.b. Our Italian school in Bologna remains open throughout August, and has air-con in all the classrooms. But the city itself is HOT. The best times to visit, that’s to say the periods with the nicest weather, are probably late-April to June (basically, now) and mid-September to mid-October.

By the way, I’m putting the finishing touches to this article at Stansted airport (did I finally manage to spell that right?) It’s Tuesday evening and there are still four hours to wait until my flight back home to Italy. Plenty of time, then, to head to ‘Spoons, for a plate of nachos and a final pint of good beer. Or two.

Alla prossima settimana, allora.

What I’m reading/watching this week

Finished the second ‘Claudius’ ebook, finally! The two volumes totalled more than eight hundred pages, in Italian, and all the characters seemed to have very similar, long, Latin names. Also also completed the personal finance ebook, Italian too, but shorter and much easier. I’ve just seen the same book in the airport bookshop (in English) priced at £16.99, which cheered me up a lot. Aren’t libraries wonderful?
I’ve also been reading the usual newspapers and magazines, mostly in English, some in Italian, and for the flight I have a newspaper each in French, Spanish and Swedish. Or I might just doze.
Talking of newspapers, it was thanks to an article in the Guardian about a resurgence in the popularity of detective fiction (sells well in ‘troubled times’), I discovered the writer Jonathan Lethem, and downloaded from the library the Italian translation of the book that the article mentioned, ‘Il detective selvaggio’ (English original title: The Feral Detective). If you like that sort of thing, it seems like a fun read.
No films, as I’ve been in England visiting and went to bed super-early the whole weeek. There was no Netflix, so my dad and I spent too many hours watching the world snooker championship, along with sundry antiques auctions and game shows. Snooker is huge in China these days, apparently. You read it here first.

P.S.

Don’t forget to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com, will you? There’ll be a new one tomorrow (Thursday), another on Saturday, and so on. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday – text and audio in italiano – regular as clockwork!

Why should you care? Because reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills. Also because EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE. Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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