Badaude

"Isn't it meant to be bigger than that?"

I'm on the phone to the art director of a magazine where I freelance.

I draw gardens for them. I've done it for about a year and a half.
I can remember my agent calling me up in the beginning and saying, "do you know anything about plants?"

"Yes," I lied, emptying a cold coffee into a vase of wilting peonies, "I'm a keen gardener."

This job had not turned me into a plantswoman, but I do know a little more about gardens.

Some things I have learnt about drawing plants during the last eighteen months:

• There are estimated to be over 7500 different varieties of Rose. And they're increasing. You can name a rose after your boyfriend or your dog, like you can name a star. Are there as many potential different kinds of rose as there are stars in the universe? This is something I worry about.
• Leaves on plants never overlap when they don't have to.
• Green takes up a large portion of the CIE chromaticity diagram because it is in the central area of human color perception. Or, in print terms: on my color printer info sheet there are 64 million colors that a computer can decipher. Since there are 6 colors: three primary (red/blue/yellow) and three secondary (orange/green/violet) plus black, then 64 million divided by 7 is 9,142,857.1 which means that, even in the unlikely event that each colour occupies an equal share, there are 9,142,857.1 different colors of green.

Here is something else I learned about plants:

So I've just submitted my latest piece and my delightfully, scrupulously, almost painfully polite editor is calling me up to make changes. While I'm listening, I grimace, silently, into the telephone, hoping that, this month, I haven't committed many glaring horticultural errors.

Him: "Your latest illustration for us. It's really lovely."

Me: (cheerfully, suspiciously) "Thank you."

"Really, yes, really lovely. There's just a few tiny points I'd like to go through with you. The petals of erigeron"

"Which?" (I have found that using the shortest possible responses preserves a veneer of expertise without exposing my ignorance.)

"The erigeron: the small, daisy-like flower."

"Yes? Oh - yes - I know the one you mean"

"Well, the petals should be pointing up from around the flower centre, OK? You know, like a gas flame on a hob."

"OK."

"I'm sorry, not sure if this was communicated to you adequately. I'm going to send a little piccy over for reference. Would that be OK?"

"Of course." (Phew - is that all?)

Him: (cautiously) "And another little thing."

Me: (warily) "Yes?"

"Well, The echeveria is almost there but our horticultural editor feels that if you were to shrink
in size the ones around the edges (so theres a little variation) it would be
a truer depiction."

"Is that the blobby thing."

"Yes, you could call it blobby. In the corner. With blue-ish foliage."

"OK - OK. I can do that."

"That's fanatastic. That's great. Wonderful."

"Oh, fantastic - good."

"Good. Great. Wonderful. There's just one more little thing."

"Oh?"

"The Zingiberaceae."

"Right?"

"Yes. In the right hand corner. Right there at the bottom."

"The little tiny plant, with the red flowers?"

"Yes, that's the one. Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes. Well I'm not sure whether you got the reference we emailed."

"OK?"

"Well, the thing is, you are going to have to alter it."

"Hmmm. Yes. OK"

"You see... Well, I can see that you've drawn it at about thirty centimetres tall."

"Yes."

"Well, I've consulted with our in-house expert and it seems... Well it seems that it's a little bigger. It actually grows to the height of..."

"How tall?"

"Six metres."

...

Here are a few of my recent gardens (none of which caused me so much horticultural mortification).

A late spring English cottage garden with lots of acid greens.

Full summer with foxgloves and delphiniums.

...and here are the Zingerberaceae

 

Parisiennes at the Musee Carnavalet

I lost my umbrella at the Kiraz exhibition last week in the Musee Carnavalet. It was that Tuesday when the storm we'd been warned about all weekend finally broke and the rain came down in the rue that Kerouac called 'the street of the Middle Class French People' the size of old franc pieces.

I ran into Carnavalet to get dry. Not that it ever rains in Kiraz's Paris watercolours. Sometimes it's night, sometimes it's Spring or Winter. Sometimes it's not Paris but Deauville or Biarritz, but it's always the same and it's always beautiful.

I walk up and down the ranks of his charmed Parisiennes all with the same, endlessly-repeated cute/shocked sex-doll face (it's no surprise Kiraz was asked to illustrate for Playboy) each topped by a differnt hairstyle (as Flaubert said: 'blondes; hotter than brunettes - see 'brunettes': brunettes: hotter than blondes - see 'blondes'; redheads - see blondes, brunettes').

His every-ready bachelors - goofy-toothed hicks perpetually on the edge of uncomfortable adolescence - are even more indistinguishable from each other - avatars for the artist himself?

The sugar-daddies and outraged older generation are generally out of the frame. There are some scenes from young married life, and a few stern grannies and disapproving matrons, but what happens to his girls during the time in which they grow from adorable Lolitas to comic redoutables?

Maybe they buy some of the products aimed at middle-aged women which his youthful drawings were used to promote: Candarel sugar-substitute and Scandale (an early form of  'magic knickers').

There always has to be a punchline to justify these semi-naked sirens. Kiraz frequently adds his own one-liners to his publicity drawings which, though changed for the final advertisement, work just as well. There's something interchangeable about the humour - just as there is about the girls.

So what - apart from the soft-porn element - makes Kiraz's drawings so attractive? What really sets them apart is his use of colour. The bottomless twilight of his indigo summer nights on the Champs Elysees and la Croisette. The sheer lace with which he drapes his girls, subtly altering the colour of their bodies; the transparent sheen of their reflections as they dive into a swimming pool, their feet skimming the water without ever getting wet (it seems appropriate that he drew advertisements for Perrier). He loves to show women with luminous, grey-shadowed skin, the sun behind them. Like Delacroix, he can paint "the skin of Venus with mud".

His fine art canvasses explore the Leger-like solidity of his heavy-legged, tiny-bosomed muses (not at all the build of most real-life Parisiennes I see) as he tries with Cubist symmetry, to turn his subjects inside out and get access to all sides of the girl at once.

This is some of the most lustful art I've ever seen.

Kiraz is the MacDonald's of sex (albeit with haute-cuisine execution) offering a reassuringly familiar experience again and again and again. Men are always horny, and women a combination of idealist and gold digger worthy of Anita Loos. The most sophisticated sexual situations become light as bubbly Perrier water because the his characters' feelings are never serious. Ideas, politics, business can never change anything as they all lead circularly from their motivating force to their ultimate goal: sex. It's an utterly charming, cynical, self-contained universe. But...

As I leave Kiraz's rainless paradise for the wet street, a final cartoon catches my eye: A BCBG mamie tackles her soixantehuitarde granddaughter on what odd ideas could have prompted her desire to move from her family's Neuilly townhouse to the Left Bank.

Mais, Francoise, je ne comprends pas ce qui t'empeche de vivre 'intensement' avenue Foch.

(But, Francoise, I don't understand what's preventing you from living 'intensely' on the Avenue Foch.)

In Kiraz's world, what indeed?

"Well... I guess that's what you'd call 'the conscious'."

I'm reading the guide notes on the walls of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They're annoying me. I'm seeing the exhibition with a friend. It's always good to have someone to complain to.

"Look, here it says about how miserable she is again: 'depression, anxiety, the fear of abandonment, of loss of love.' It says it's all going on in the 'depths of her unconscious'."

Although Bourgeois' material comes from the unconscious, and often from misery, she transforms it with tough, highly-articulate and playful conscious thought.

Ok - let's look at the most immediately obvious things about an artist who is shown in the bank of photos outside her exhibition, unfailingly smiling. She smiles wisely, secretly, ironically, openly; she smiles from inside her sculptures; she smiles at Andy Warhol; she smiles wickedly and most famously holding under her arm a latex phallic sculpture entitled, 'little girl'.

Let's look at her early, isolated, stick-like, sculptured human figures whose fragile attempts to connect with each other are described by the artist with a nod and a wink - look at those two stick-people standing together, the 'female' inclining her head toward the 'male', 'listening' (as in the title of the piece) clearly not only with affection, but a definite touch 'yes, dear, very nice, dear,' in her attitude.

It's so hard to ignore the hard hysterical, joke-y surrealism which inhabits her sketches and prints of 'house-wives' - women imprisoned by their domestic role. So - let's not ignore it.

Her 1960s 'body parts' sculptures of penis-breasts, which she teasingly denies are sexual are not only 'repellant, and unsettling' but also meltingly and sensually textured: here is someone who enjoys sex and likes to play around with gender.

It's good to see a room of pieces inspired by the artist's mother whom Bourgeois had a deep need to rehabilitate from her role as silent witeness to a powerful and adulterous husband. Bourgeois transforms her into an enourmous spider - a huge, twisted being; the domestic become monstrous through a change of size -  but also a friendly maternal force with her well-protected bundle of eggs. In the end, this spider scares me less than the ones I find in the bath. I'd like to have this spider on my side.

And let's not shy away from the fact that Bourgeois' work is and has always consciously followed fashion. As maxi-skirts followed minis, so Bourgeois' early Giacommeti-like figures were superseded by her installation works in the 1980s then by her currently fashionable use of embroidery and textiles. If she's 'impossible to categorise' it's not through iconoclasm but her knowing and eclectic use of any art movement she finds lying around.

The slightly po-faced exhibition guide has concentrated on Bourgeois' pain rather than the angry, intelligent, tough jouissance with which she transforms into a clearly-articulated visual language her hard, priviliged, trivial, serious life.

We get to the last of the noticeboards. My friend agrees:

"They keep on going on about the subconscious meaning. I don't think it's subconscious. It's - what do they call that thing that's above the subconscious."

"Well... I guess that's what you'd call 'the conscious'."

...

“I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible.” Louise Bourgeois

The exhibition continues at the Centre Pompidou, Paris until June 2 2008, 11h00 - 21h00

Dogwalking in Neuilly...

I have a block on Neuilly. Can't spell it. Can't pronounce it.

I meet a friend for lunch at La Palette. I say

"I'm going to apartment-and-dog-sit for a friend in Nelly."

"Ou?"

"In Nelly"

"Quoi?" (I can't hear you).

"Nelly. You know. That place on the edge of town. The place where Sarkozy junior was going to stand for election.

I copy out my new address and my friend says,

"You've spelt it wrong: it has a i."

"Like this? Neil-y?"

"No. With a u too."

"OK, Nu-illy.Like New-ly? "

 "Like this: Neuilly And you pronounce it New-yee."

"Noy-ee."

"New-yee."

"OK."

Prenez Soin de Vous - Sophie Calle at the BNF

Do not bring your boyfriend to this exhibition. This is not an exhibition for couples. And, if you are male, don't bring your girlfriend. In fact, maybe don't come at all.

There are a few couples here to see Sophie Calle's multimedia project set in the beautiful 19th Salle Labrouste domed reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, but I don't fancy their chances. Most of the spectators are women in groups, or women alone. A few lone men wander through, glancing tentatively at the desktop screens scattered throughout the room. Most of them are looking increasingly queasy.

You see, once upon a time, Artist Sophie Calle's ex-lover sent her an email of breathtaking audacity in which he explained that he had begun to see other women and, out of respect for her desire for a limited form of monogamy (the man rumored to be Monsieur X is married), had decided to chuck her and hold onto them. But hey, he ends, "Prenez soin de vous - Take care of yourself.".

What's a girl to do? Well, Ms Calle decided that, as she was too devastated to reply to this message personally, she could best take care of herself by sending copies of it to 107 other Frenchwomen, from a police psychiatrist to a schoolgirl, asking for their advice and opinions on the break-up message, then exhibit the results for everyone in Paris (and the World, via her participation in this year's Venice Biennale) to see, hear and read.

Sophie Calle's previous work has similarly relied on letting other people tell her what to do. She let a stranger dictate her daily movements (Suite Venetienne, 1980) and imitated a fictional version of herself created by American writer Paul Auster (Double Game 1998). Yet, through this self-abandonment, she obtains an odd kind of power.

This time, she has asked a screenwriter, a poet, two sibling romance-novelists, a translator, a cartoonist, a florist, a judge, magazine and book editors, a journalist, a mathematician, and a schoolteacher, amongst others, to explain her life to her. They've responded, not only as women, but according to their metier, and their opinions on the ex range from possible violent psychosis (from the police psychiatrist) to the only woman (I’m afraid I forget her metier but I think it may have been something to do with astrology) who takes the email at face value, believing that the writer has a great and genuine love and respect for the artist.

If you've ever been dumped, the result is exhilarating fun. In a reading-room full of old books, mostly written by men, Calle has made new books from the replies she received, all written by women. There is also a 'livre d'or' of responses to the exhibition to which men can contribute: I notice the entry, "I'M JUST A NORMAL, BORING MAN!" written in the largest and most self-aggrandising script in the album.

But the exhibition is not just about revenge. It's a patchwork, a firework, a peacock's tail, a hall of mirrors of the diverse lives modern Frenchwomen are able to lead. Reading the responses, you can no longer tell where the woman ends and her metier begins.

She has also asked actresses, singers, dancers and a sign-language interpreter to perform their versions of the email, which are played on a loop on screens suspended form the ceiling. Some of them have chosen to enact the voice of the man, some that of the woman reading the letter. You hear the noise of women everywhere. The sounds from the screens mix with reactions of the female spectators to create a constant buzz. It reminds me of the British novelist and critic, Marina Warner who, speaking at her old college in my hometown, Oxford, UK, told an audience of present-day, mixed-sex undergraduates how shocking and disturbing, then how empowering, she had found the unfiltered noise of 300 raucous female students when she joined the then all-girl institution as an undergraduate. In the Salle Lebrouste, the voice of one man has become the voice of many women: a parliament of poulets. It's jubilant.

I'm at the far end of the hall, watching a video screen of a classical ballerina dance her version of the message, when the man in front of me, hypnotised by the image, backs me against a library desk. In order to see better, he steps backwards, squarely and heavily onto one of my feet. He stays there. I am wearing sandals. He is not slightly built. It hurts. He appears not to notice what he has done. I am about to protest when he cranes his neck further back and steps, heavily and squarely, onto my other foot. Now he has me trapped, unable to move, between himself and the desk. Only when he leans into me does he realise there is another body behind him. He turns abruptly, horrified and, before scuttling toward the exit whispers, shamefacedly,  'Pardon, Madame!"

This piece was written for IVY Paris.

Sophie Calle, Prenez Soin de Vous, continues at the Richlieu site of the BNF until 8th June. Tuesday - Saturday 10am-8pm (late night opening till 10pm on Thursdays). Sundays from midday - 8pm. Closed Mondays. Adults 7 euros, concessions 5 euros More info: www.bnf.fr

News from Somewhere Else

...continued from last post

Like me, Ted (see last week's post) has been invited to to spend the evening of Mayday, celebrating the publication of the new edition of The Idler.

After getting up at 5am, Ted opted to go home to bed. I managed to stay awake.

I reached Farringdon tube station at about 7pm to find about 70 people standing on a traffic island in the middle of Clerkenwell Green. They were drinking beer out of plastic glasses while spit-roasting a whole pig. It was drizzling and the pig was steaming gently.

For a while, the rain got heavier and I worried that the pig would be put out. However, it eventually stopped and the animal began to sizzle and blacken.

Did the hog-roasters have permission? Apparently not. At one point, a fire engine circled us slowly but decided we were not a health and safety risk. 

I talked to Tibor Fischer about plummers in Streatham; Dan Kieran about milk floats; Matthew de Abaitua about the Arthur C Clarke award and Clare Pollard about the quality of hog roasts in Bolton.

Circulus played crum-horns and some mummers mummed. I thought they were great (does no-one else enjoy fart jokes?).

It got cold. We went to the Three Kings pub round the corner. We stood outside. Someone cornered me. He said,

"I remember you. The last time I saw you, you were wearing high heels in the Groucho Club. I remember you because you didn't walk like most girls in high heels. You could actually walk in them."

None of these details seemed familiar to me. Nor did he. If it was a chat-up line, I applaud its studied complexity.

It began to get colder. I went back to the roast. The only way to stay warm was to nestle up to the pig.

Toward the end of the evening, with the pork and his work diminishing, I got to talk to John Mitchinson, hog roaster, ex-publisher, writer and telly producer, about his pig.

"Is is your pig? I wanted to ask its name."

It's actually a pig from the next door field. But it knew our pigs. So that's about as close to being one of our pigs as you can get. I feel I know it. I shot it this morning."

John and his co-roaster load the remains of the pig into a body bag, his face blacked as a May Day Green Man. He asks me,

"Are you just talking to me, or are you working."

"I'm always working, sort of."

All the next day, I smelt mildly smoked, like bacon.

...

Here's the second part of my Idler piece. Double click to enlarge...

News from somewhere: Oxford

Artist, Ted Dewan phones me at 5.40am in the morning; "You'll have to be quick. I think they're about to shut us in."

I'm walking quickly toward the centre of Oxford. It's the first of May. Despite the early hour, the street is full of people who are all walking in the same direction as me.

Ted has found us tickets to get inside Magdalen College to watch the choir of the College School sing from the tower of the Chapel as they do at dawn every May morning. Tickets are limited to those with a close connection to the College. Everyone else watches from the street. How did he come by them?

He mutters something to do with a mathematician and a Tibetan actress.

Ted is wearing a fedora and fingerless gloves. He is carrying a large golf umbrella. Ted is American. He is always prepared for the British weather.

OK, there has to be an obligatory British note on the weather. It has rained for the last few days. Rained so much that any expectation of Spring last weekend, when I helped spit-roast whole lambs to celebrate the Russian Orthadox Easter (but that's another story), has almost disappeared. This morning the sky is cloudy, but not altogether covered with grey. There is some hope. On May Day, there always is.

We wind through a few of Magdalen's quads, past signs which say, do not enter.

"If you live in Oxford for any time," says Ted, "the first thing you learn is to walk all over 'no entry' signs."

The forbidden lawn in the centre of Magdalen is open today. I feel I'm stepping on hallowed ancient ground but it's just one of those particularly Oxford-ish illusions. The finest, greenest, most untouched lawn in the University is surrounded by a Medieval-looking  stone cloisters, whose - in fact 19th century - gargoyles are so secular, so un-Christian, that they could be fabulous figures from the mythology of another world. The University, imitating itself, has created something entirely new.

The crowd of people on the lawn is peering up at the square stone tower of the chapel. They're pointing to something tiny and white, glimpsed through the crenelations; a choirboy's surplice flapping like a white flag way up above as the choir assembles for the airborne service.

Two students are lying on a mattress in the centre of the lawn, staring at the sky, ostentatiously wearing pyjamas.

It's perfect. But Ted is not satisfied.

"There's a little door somewhere, that goes up to the other, smaller tower. We should find it. I've been up there before. We could get a better view."

"OK."

We walk round and back through the main quad and round again, looking for a little door in a wall.

Eventually we find one. But we do not have the blue tickets for the tower, says the gatekeeper. Our tickets are yellow, and only entitle us to stand in the grounds.

Ted thinks we should hang around, "With hope but not with expectation." Like me he has worked as an illustrator and this is a natual position.

The gatekeeper asks, "Where are you from?"

"Oxford," we both reply.

"You don't sound like it. Do you like it here."

"Yes."

"I hate it. Miserable place. Do you have tickets for the tower?"

We show our incorrectly-coloured tickets.

"Wait a bit and I'll see if anyone doesn't turn up who is on my list. It's your accent." The gatekeeper turns to Ted. "I think I can trust you to go up there. I think you know who you can trust, don't you?"

We wait, more in hope than expectation. Hope triumphs.

At the bottom of the tower, past another 'private' sign, we follow narrow spiral stone steps steeply up and up and round and round.

We pass a narrow oak door labelled, Library, then one named, Archives. I notice an obviously recent white scratch of graffiti in a flashily archaic Renaissance script; another near the top, more hastily written: Stutton (?) School, 1951. We get to the top. The spiral unravels into a door; a space of sky. A blue grey lead roof looms toward us at forehead level.

As soon as we walk out onto the leads, we both begin to suffer suddenly, alarmingly from vertigo. The roof slopes in two planes toward a central point; the castellations, level to the outward gaze, tilt at odd angles from within. Those near the edges of the peaked roof are deep, those near its peak alarming shallow. We loose our balance, our orientation. We lurch over the tiny figures on the lawn beneath us. We sway back into the centre. We edge away from the sides, toward the centre of the roof while (does vertigo increase with age?) children lean fearlessly between the castelations, pulling their feet off the ground, their weight on their elbows for a better view.

Then the college bells begin to ring. There's a great triumphant howl from the crowd below in the street. Their distant heads sway forward like a wave.

Someone must have jumped in. 

Then, quite abruptly, everything is still as the choir begin to sing.

I turn East. Over the crowd of rooftops, I can see the great, green bowl of country that surrounds Oxford. For a moment, it possesses the city. The sun breaks in a sheet of luminous orange through a screen of cloud.

...

A little later, we walk up Oxford High Street against the tide of up-all-night students. The boys don't seem to wear black tie any more, or the girls ball dresses. They wear Topshop frocks which show a lot more laddered and mud-splattered stockinged leg. One girl in front of me has been carrying her high heels for some time. There's a large, pink circle covering and the base of both her legs, tapering up toward the back of each knee in a teardrop shape. From a distance, it looks like something luridly and pinkly sticking to her foot but as I get nearer, I realise what I can see is her inflamed heels sticking through the back of her ruined tights.

We cross Radcliffe Sqare to discover some astonishingly assorted Scottish dancers; a Green Man entirely covered in leaves like a dancing conical Christmas tree; Melissa's band, (see last year's post) minus Melissa who is at home looking after her six-month-old son, stamping and dancing and beating drums with flowers in their hair.

I have to get back to work. Ted walks with me back to the University Parks where I've left my car. I ask Ted what he's working on.

A book about a teddy bear.

But now, he says, I'm going to find myself a beer.

He walks off, Paddington-ly, swaying gently, with his hat and his umbrella, to find one of the many pubs open on May Morning.

A book about a Teddy Bear?

About a Ted?

...

Below is the first part of a piece from the Idler Magazine, which was published on the first of May, 2008.

More news from somewhere else - and the second part of The Idler piece, next week.

The love bus

I'm on my way home from Rome. The number 64 is the bus to Roma Terminale from which I can catch the train to Fiumincino airport.

It's the morning rush hour and the bus is crammed with commuters. As we travel along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, the number of commuters declines and the number of tourists returning to the central station increases. Like Paris buses, there are few seats and lots of standing room. Travellers sit on their cases which go into occasional freefall around a sharp corner.

The bus remains crammed. Standing room only. I notice a woman who is very obviously a tourist. she's in her fifties. Unglamourous. She is wearing clothes which she clearly only wears on holiday. She has a bright red 'fun' vacationer's suitcase. She is alone.

An Italian man stands behind her. He's much younger. Around 30. He leans close behind her. She doesn't speak Italian. He speaks to her in English.

Is this your first time in Rome? he asks.

Did you go to see the Forum? The Pantheon? Did you think they were beautiful? Where are you from? Did you visit the Bernini fountain? Would you like to return to Rome?

As the bus rounds a corner, he leans closer, right against her. She must be able to feel his stubble against her cheek. He is almost whispering in her ear.

Why is he doing this? Is he trying to pick her pocket? Does he have a thing about older women? Or is he a genuine ambassador of the city, eager to leave the woman with a favourable impression?

At this very moment, I notice a light pressure against my thigh. I look behind me. There's an old, not un-handsome Italian guy in a checked shirt with a grey pointed moustache which he is obviously proud enough to care for. He is not looking at me. His eyes are focussed on a distant point as can only be the eyes of someone who is deliverately trying to avoid your gaze.

The pressure on my leg is light. A butterfly-like tapping. It moves up. It begins to move down again. The bus swings in the opposite direction. It doesn't go away. It must be deliberate.

I wonder what I should do. Should I shout? Should I move away? Should I turn to him and hiss, testa di cazzo!*, a phrase a friend taught me to deal with just such a situation. I examine my feelings. Am I annoyed? No, not really. Is he doing any harm? Would I harm him more by a public telling off? Or would I end up looking ridiculous? Would I diminish a pleasure which is costing me very little? Above all, would I sacrifice my storyteller's desire to know what happens next?

By the time I have thought about this for some time, we are approaching Terminale and such reactions come to seem a little ungenerous. I don't think the hand is going anywhere else and the butterfly tappings are so light as to seem politely tentative. If that's what gets him his kicks, why not?

We reach the stop for the station.

I look accross at the other tourist and her toy boy. They are still aimiably discussing the beauty of Romes sites. I am still worried that he is going to rob her.

Nothing has happened. Maybe nothing has happened to her either. Maybe she's the winner in this sitaution. Maybe everything is just as it seems.

Maybe there is no story.

I get off and drag my suitcase toward the station. I don't see either of the men leave the bus. A fresh group of tourists exist the station and pile onto the bus.

I wonder whether they will be making the return journey.

...

*dickhead. For more great Italian swear words, see here.

Italians

at the Bar della Pace, last night...

Rates of exchange

I have never been so short-changed as I have here in Rome. Shop assistants charge me double; waiters add and subtract dishes from my bill seemingly at random; at the market, the first delicious fragoline (tiny wood strawberries) of the season cost 5 euros at one stall, 2 euros at another.

In the supermarket on the Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle, wine is cheap; milk is expensive.

I am carrying back from the supermarket, a six-pack of litre bottles of water; a litre of milk, a bottle of red wine and a jar of Nutella, along with less substantial groceries. The supermarket bag handles are starting to cut into my palms. How does everyone else manage? I don't see Romans hauling the sacs a roulettes I see in Paris. Do they have it all delivered? Do they just not eat?

When I reach the Piazza Navona, I have to sit down. I don't want to sit in the Piazza at this time of day. I love the Piazza in the morning when the sun has hardly risen and the square is a deep shadow-gulley with only the whirr of the cleaning truck and the clank of waiters putting out the endless rows of cafe chairs. But later in the day, the portrait artists arrive;the tour groups, the school trips, the men selling battery-powered toys, sunglasses, cheap jewellery.

The famous Bernini fountain is under wraps for restoration. It's plasticized outline fills the whole of the square. Nevertheless, Navona is crammed with people who stand and turn on the spot and try and try to see. They peer through the windows in the plastic that shrouds the sculptures, sometimes catching the angle of an elbow, a knee.

The groups in the middle of the square - teenagers and coach tours who cannot afford the cafes' prices, stand disconsolately or sit on the edges of the two smaller unwrapped fountains. They look at the people in the cafes. The people in the cafes, sitting in compariative and expensive comfort, look back.

As I pass the corner of Viccolo della Pace, the waiter from Tre Scalini says,

A table for lunch, Signora?

It's 10.30am

No, grazie.

A table, Signora? How many?

No. Grazie!

I hold out my hand in a basta gesture and walk away.

I have to sit down. There are no public benches in Rome. People sit on the walls of fountains, on steps. At the monument to King - built, with staggering arrogance, to dwarf the Imperial Forum on the Piazza Venezia, there is a notice requiring visitors not to sit on the steps as such lack of respect for this national monument would offend the Italian people. On chuches of far greater architectural and historical importance; on ancient Roman sites, there are no such notices. Romans, disrespectfully, have nicknamed. the interfereing monument the Big White Typewriter.

Like the teenaged and old-aged tour groups without the money the cafes, I sit on the edge one of the fountains where a group of ragazzi (boys) are noting with pleasure that one of the stone tritons is blowing water out through his nostrils.

As soon as I sit down, the street sellers arrive: a man selling Italia football shirts and lycra shorts decorated with a picture of the stone genitals of Michaelangelo's David; another with small magnets which buzz when tossed in the air. They offer me the magnets, the shorts.

No, grazie.

Signora?

No, grazie.

A man selling cheap metal and enamel jewellery takes my hand and folds it around a necklace.

I try to give it back but he backs away, hovvering at a safe distance.

Five Euro, Signora. Only five Euro!

He won't take it back.

You want to give it to me?

For you, two Euro, only two Euro.

If you want to give it to me, I'll take it. But I don't want to buy anything.

One Euro? Signora?

But I don't want it.

I lay the necklace on the fountain. He picks it up and leaves but as soon as he moves on, another moves in.

Rosa, Signora, Roses?

Please

One rosa; only two Euro!

don't try to sell me anything.

I am irrationally and suddenly angry.

I stand up.

I stand unecessarily close to him.

He's wearing a long, brown djebellah which smells strongly of sweat. I don't know whether it's brown from dirt and age, or whether this is it's natural colour.

I look directly into his eyes, which are very close to mine. There isn't any Piazza Navona any more. Just this man and me.

I say, quietly and as firmly as possible,

Go Away.

Signora?

Louder

Go. Away.

I'm not quite sure what I'm prepared to do at this point. Luckily, nor is he.

After a long moment:

Ok, Signora,

he says. I go away.

...

Round the corner, at Caffe della Pace, I drink prosecco. The waitress brings me unasked-for olives, peanuts and elaborately lumpy spicy-flavoured lumps.

I begin to feel bad about the man in Navona; about the bartenders, the shopkeepers; the market stallholders. After all, it works the other way too: grocers put extra oranges in my bag after I've paid; waiters forget to charge me for dessert; this morning, a flowerseller ran up to gave me a perfect canna lily, the stalk broken too short to use in his display.

I think all transactions in Italy are just less fixed; more open to negotiation which offends my firmly entrenched, Anglo-Saxon sense of fixed value. Italians are also more willing to enter casually into negotiation, and expect you to haggle even if you don't want what they're offering.

I finish my prosecco. Although this is one of the most fashionable cafes in the area, the bill is much small. Wine is cheap: milk is expensive. But I can't get the waitress's attention. I leave the money on the table, along with a generous tip to make up for what? For not asking for the bill? For the peanuts? For the flower-seller? I wonder whether the staff will think I've skipped without paying. I do not want another encounter of any kind.

I'm half-way down the street when the waitress catches up with me.

She touches my arm.

4 euros, please.

I look at her. She looks anxious. She is younger than me. She doesn't want to be asking this question.

It's ok - I left it on the table.

She believes me. It's funny. I laugh; she laughs. I have paid correctly the correct sum which has been correctly demanded of me. We are both relieved.