Goodbye Silvio Berlusconi. Maybe he’s gone to the great bunga bunga party in the sky. Or maybe his version of hell is knowing there’s a bunga bunga party going on but you are not allowed to take part.
Either way, that’s one former political leader who is not going to make a comeback!
Johnson and Trump on the other hand, despite their trials and tribulations might still push their way back into positions of political power. Oh! To have such ambition! Both still seem to have followers who admire their qualities. I suppose there is no accounting for taste.
Here’s a story of survival, an article about the four Colombian children who survived in the Amazon jungle after a plane crash. It’s hard to imagine a mother, knowing that she was dying, telling her children that maybe they should leave her. She persuaded them that that was how they might be rescued. Then there’s the ability of the eldest child, 13 years old, to keep her smaller siblings alive until they were found. Apparently they were lucky, as members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, to have the jungle knowledge to find stuff to eat and then there’s the fact that the plane crashed at the “right” time of year, when the trees were in fruit. I wonder if city children would have survived in the jungle. They were found by organised search parties with sniffer dogs, who may well have passed within yards of the children without seeing them initially. Or maybe the children actually hid from them. One theory is that the children may have been frightened of the uniformed search party because their father had previously been threatened by members of a dissident unit of the demobilised Colombian rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. It’s a different world to the one our youngsters mostly grownup in.
Having said that, it seems to me that we are getting more reports of violent incidents among our young people. Just this weekend eleven teenagers were arrested on suspicion of murder after a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death. Members of the public rushed to help the boy before paramedics arrived in Eastfield Avenue, Bath, but he could not be saved and died at the scene at about 11pm on Saturday.
And then, in some countries, you might have angry neighbours with a gun. An 11-year-old British girl was shot dead as she played on swings in the garden of her family home in a village in western France on Saturday. The girl’s father and mother were also injured in the attack in the village of Saint-Herbot in Brittany while her eight-year-old sister escaped unhurt. The family, who have lived in the village for about five years, were enjoying a barbecue in their garden and the girls were playing on swings at about 10pm on Saturday when a man appeared with a gun and fired several shots. It is thought to have been all about a dispute over a plot land between the British family’s place and that of a Dutchman who lived nearby. What a crazy world!
This is all rather depressing stuff. Let’s move on.
As often happens on hot nights, I found sleeping difficult until it was almost time to get up, at which point I could have slept for England! So I got myself up rather later than planned but I was out and about by 9.00. It was already very hot. Yesterday we had thunderstorms and rain … but only briefly. A friend from the Italian class messaged me that he was finding it hard to concentrate on this week’s task because of the unusual heat. I suspect whatever the weather in this country we would find something to complain about.
We are fortunate, I told my friend, to have a very cool basement kitchen where we can take refuge if the rest of the house heats up. Mostly though it stays quite cool. That’s old stone houses for you. I’ve just seen the daughter of the house next door dragging a mattress into the garden. I thought at first she was planning some sunbathing but, no, she wants to sun to work some magic on the mattress which is a bit musty.
Like ours, their house has a basement area, which originally would have been a kind of storage area, not really used for general habitation. For some time the house next door was divided into two, the basement area becoming a self-contained flat. Since the family bought the whole property they have re-connected the two sections with a staircase but the basement remains a sort of flat where the daughter and her partner live. When the original conversion into a flat was carried out it must not have been properly ventilated as now she finds that everything gets damp - hence the mattress needing some sunshine magic. Fortunately her father is a builder so he will try to put things right while she and her partner are away for a week.
We find our basement needs regular ventilation all year round and a bit of extra heating in the winter. But lately as the warm weather has come along it’s been a case of opening the door to let some warm air in. And over the last few days, with temperatures creeping up, it’s a relief to have a cool place. According to this article, heatwaves might become more frequent here. We’ll have to adjust accordingly.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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