One thing that used to annoy the hell out of Carol was my talking to holes
in the ground.
It wasn't (which it was of course) that this behaviour might seem just a
little odd, or that Carol wasn't perfectly capable of chatting to a bit of
Florentine roadwork, but she thought the holes in the road I liked to talk
to were *common*.
She'd stand in the background tapping her foot and muttering under her
breath, "That bloody hole never even graduated from highschool!"
"Scusi, is the signora impunning my educational background?" whatever
hole-in-the-road I happened to be chatting to at the time would mutter
worriedly.
"Don't worry," I'd mutter back, "she's American and like that -- probably
can't tell you apart."
"Ah, capisco!" the bit of accidental Florentine construction I would be
talking to at the time would reply, brightening up, and we'd get back to
discussing the exchange rate of the pound versus the lira or the length of
prostitutes' skirts (which given their perspective, was something that
Florentine holes-in-the-ground were something of experts in) -- the usual
stuff that you discuss with a hole in the ground in Florence.
That wasn't the problem -- the problem was this bloody five hundred year old
dead bore in the Boboli Gardens.
For Carol, while contemporary holes in the ground were common as shit, a
five hundred year old dead boar was history.
"Did you ever meet Cosimo dei Medici?" gushed Carol.
"Meet him, my dear?" smirked the ded bore, "I was poisoned by Ficino."
Oh, big deal, given that Cosimo's vertically challenged personal physician's
default method of curing a client with a hangnail was to poison him, it was
virtually impossible to walk through Florence in the 1490s and *not* be
poisoned by Marsilio.
Trying to break into the conversation, I grumbled, "Hey, you ever meet Pico,
or watch Savonarola or Bruno burn?"
Turning to me (in so far a five hundred year old dead boar in the Bobili
Gardens can turn), the Dead Boar simply said:
"Fuck off, red nose."
Baffled the hell out of me -- how can a dead five hundred year old
Florentine whatsit know the punch line of a David Frost's Younger Brother
Joke which was a spin-off of That Was The Week, That Was (it's over, let it
go) in black and white Brit TV in the sixties?
Still baffles me.
Maybe he dated Millicent Martin.
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