I've
made a new friend. Grappa is a drink made by distillation
whatever drink you started making, for example wine, has
been completed. It varies in strength but will generally,
in the quantities I've been consuming it, make you go blind.
I have not yet had a nice grappa. Yet there is something
about the stuff that for an Englishman is irresistible:
it's devastatingly close to drinking petrol but if several
of you order one the bottle is often left at your table.
Of course, only in Britain is getting drunk a pastime in
itself.
The key to grappa is that though it's really not very nice
it doesn't matter what it's like because its effects are
amazing and it gets better the more you drink, because you
no longer care.
This is, strangely, exactly like Italian TV.
Two things fascinate me about Italian telly. The first
is the weather, because I'm English. We're made this way.
Sometimes
the weather seems to be presented by some Italian Air Force
colonel and at others by young ladies. Some channels give
you Idiot Weather, where no particular area is well defined
but the map looks nice, and others give you Clever Weather,
where the maps look like they've been drawn by a two-year-old
but the information includes millibars of mercury and sailing
information. I understand none of this because I want Clever
Weather for Idiots, a blend so far I have not seen. One
day I was treated to the next day's projected minimum temperatures
but no maximums, which made me wonder if it was some kind
of Surprise Weather Day.
The other thing about Italian TV that's proved irresistible
is Veline, a show the point of which I have so far been
utterly unable to understand, hosted by a man who insists
on wearing shirts that look like tin foil.
Veline
consists of a stage erected somewhere in Italy, six young
women and a bizarre gravel-voiced giant Muppet inside which
is a man whose idea of integrity must have vanished some
years ago. The women all wear rosettes numbered one through
six, are all dressed in as little as possible and each take
turns at saying their names and where they live, something
about themselves and then doing a little dance to a tune
they like. Sometimes they are interrupted by the giant Muppet
who gets them to perform some inane trick. Sometimes they
have to do impressions. They invariably do these things
extremely badly.
It
is, however, of no consequence. Veline is so show-stoppingly
bad, so unbelievably puerile and vacuous that it is unmissable.
The giant Muppet is one of the funniest things I have ever
seen on TV anywhere in the world, and I have watched a fair
amount of TV in hotels around the globe. As far as I can
tell, one of the women is voted by a 'panel' of 'judges'
on criteria that are completely arbitrary. At the end a
winner is announced. What she gets, I do not know. If these
are heats in a competition, I cannot tell. I don't care.
It is truly awesome and is repeated nightly, which is all
I ask.
I suppose that one of the 'points' of Veline is Rule 1
of Italy: this country is full to the point of critical
mass of shockingly good-looking women. It is as if there
is a factory somewhere in Padua that has a huge machine
churning these women out, and at some point one of its levers
became stuck and no one knew how to turn it off. Now the
country is attempting to export them and may for all I know
start to issue them instead of air miles.
Italian
TV shows seem to have endless stocks of these women and
bring them on whenever the producers are stuck for content.
Of course, once the TV producers realised that not only
could they get away with this but people actually liked
it they just went off for coffee and never came back, which
is why Italian TV is almost bereft of quality home-grown
content and it doesn't matter.
A few Sundays ago I went out with a group of people who
should really know better to the Osteria Mochia in Barga,
where we ate and drank well. I had grappa. After the kitchens
had shut the owner came out and turned on the karaoke.
Now, I have a theory about people who run karaoke events:
they do not want you to sing. They want to sing, and if
you happen to be singing along then all the better. But
we sang, danced on tables and had a fantastic time. I even
managed to sing. People got up on furniture and took their
clothes off. Obviously this is standard.
In
keeping with the Padua Woman Factory idea, the restaurant
was run that evening by three gorgeous women. There were
several others there not working but dancing. I was shocked
into temporary speechlessness by them. The only reason they
could possibly be working in a restaurant is because, as
I said, Italy just has more than enough women as good-looking
as them. Babbo attempted to introduce me to them later in
the evening and I had to explain to him that drunken Englishmen
who've tried to polish off the house grappa, danced on tables
and sung Lionel Richie covers badly are perhaps not quite
at their best.
Babbo has truly grabbed this 'it doesn't matter' attitude,
which is why he thought it would be perfectly ok to introduce
me to these sparkling examples of Italian youth. He is,
however, far more concerned about the weather than I but
does not rely on the TV to tell him what it will be like.
He
is busy learning the ways of the contadino which appears
to involve mainly watching what his neighbour is doing.
If Ellio has covered his cut and piled grass with a mat,
it may rain. If clouds are forming in the sky, it may rain.
If he is going to spray his vines with the worryingly viscous
blue gunk he claims is organic and which requires time to
dry after spraying, there is simply the unspoken fear that
it may rain. If any of the three events above happen to
overlap his countenance takes on a pained look and the act
of spraying is as overclouded by doubt as the mountainside
is by cumulo nimbus.
Babbo has also tried to warn me about the dangers of grappa
and what he doesn't understand is that I know what it's
like and am drinking it anyway. In some ways he is truly
becoming a little farmer person: he is now a deep toast
colour, he drinks wine at odd times of the day, he worries
about his vines and he constantly tries to tell me I'm killing
myself doing whatever I'm doing.
Last
week I felt I had to get out of Barga because I hadn't been
anywhere else. Call it wanderlust, or going stir-crazy but
when Inglese Paul said "Why don't you come to Livorno
with me? I've got to drop some work off", I jumped
at the chance. After the work was over we nipped off to
a little restaurant, which proved to me beyond doubt Rule
1.
Not any major, special restaurant. Just a restaurant where
the food happened to be be very good. The Osteria per Bacco,
in fact.
This is where Rule 2 of Italy comes in: not only is there
a stupendous quantity of lovely women but Italians are generally
incapable of supplying you with bad food. You could probably
get bad food if you actually asked for it, but even then
restaurants would probably just ask you to leave.
Rule 1 still applied, of course, so this time I had to
ask if I could take a picture of the women serving in the
Osteria because I wanted photographic evidence. As you can
see, Livorno has a regular supply from the Padua Woman Factory
too.
I think, in the night, sometimes when it's late and everyone
else is asleep, I can hear the delivery van from Padua driving
by outside. I'd stop it and ask the driver if it's true,
but I wouldn't want to delay him. Even for a second.
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