Cryptic tales/ Tales from the Crypt

Turns out I am still too much of a baby for the high flying school- but Welsh girl sounded sad that this was the case so what can you do..

I called up another 5 or 10 schools, and, because I'm steadily losing confidence in my Italian language skills, there was often a daunting language barrier between me and the receptionist. One girl seemed to think repeating pronto 10 times before hanging up was an effective way to handle recruitment. I don't know..
Happily one school asked me to come round this afternoon for an interview and if I seem promising she says they'll clear a space in the afternoon for me. She sounded encouraging, but she's also Italian which adds that extra dimension of anxiety.

Class yesterday was a nice blend of hilarious and mortifying. Like that thing where you can see yourself and the class from the outside and laugh, but you're also inside yourself and, really, it's sad times. It was my teacher's fault or maybe mine for making her my new friend before class. Ah, I suffered for it.

Picture this place with rain and at least 50 mostly Muslim, often Bengali guys hanging round. It's paradoxical perhaps but somehow the more similar your backgrounds are, the further the distance you want to create..
La mia scuola:

(I changed the photo because Val tells me that the last one had shocking obscenties scrawled all over it)

I'm trying to think of short version of events but I can't organise my thoughts so we'lll just see if this flows. Concise was always my forte in school essays but somehow this never applies with blogs. What was once called thinking is now thought of as writing a blog post in my head- like yesterday I was writing a whole long piece comparing the strangeness of my current literature, Stuart Little, to the range of myriad anthropomorphic rodent stories I've read in my time from the Deptford trilogy, to Pentecost, from the Rats of Nimh to the wistful A Rat's Tale, not forgetting our darling Fievel Mousekevitz. It's just that Stuart Little plays fast and loose with our suspension of disbelief- it doesn't try to create a new universe at all but bends the rules of our own willy nilly, so at one moment it is entirely practical and reasonable in considering the problems of a mouse living a human lifestyle but at the same time seems to demand we accept that no one is more than mildly surprised to discover his human mother somehow gave birth to a mouse. The Rats of Nimh at least had mutant genetic experiments to account for their lifestyle and Pentecost was the most naturalistic of all once you discount the Brummie Rat Mafia.

I don't know if I want to talk about the class- it feels like I'm avoiding the tale talking about talking mice. Anyway I'm going to wear glasses today.

I went to the Colosseum and roundabouts yesterday. I'm no archaeologist or even a historian. My reference point looking at the ruins of the Roman forum was Shelly's Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.



San Pietro in Vincoli had the same ornate ceilings, white marble statues, and vast Biblical murals as St Peter's in the Vatican. Not the same of course but I didn't have a guide to tell me the stories and anyway it sometimes feels uncomfortably blasphemous when I see this statue is supposed to be Moses and his wives or some such. I don't like to take too many photos when I'm inside a church cause it feels intrusive, even if they are trying to catch all the tourists they can, I expect they probably hate the necessity at the same time. But the place had a few ghoulish touches that appealed to me..