2. Getting to Know You

Photo was uploaded at a later stage: shows my elder sister, younger brother and I at our home in Balls Hill, Walsall, England- with another Italian neighbour called Lucia (1957-62)

It’s not that I’m really so old and decrepit that my heart palpitates when face to face with a screen, it’s just that I didn’t grow up with computers.

In my days, things that one wrote in a private little book on a regular basis and hid under the mattress was called a diary and it took me quite some time, years, to figure out what a “blog” was. I tried looking it up in a dictionary and it went from “bloc” to “block” no word with a “g” in between. And even the computer puts a red squiggly line under it to say it’s wrong. Neither could I ask people around me because in Italy they speak Italian, and English is a foreign language which people consider a thorn in their ribs; besides, I’ve yet to meet an Italian who can masticate English better than I – which is an unfair comparison because I grew up in Britain. At first, I imagined it was some kind of blob or spot as that is the terms Italians give for an advert- life at times can be so confusing!

Hence, my language may seem antiquated because having left Britain many years ago I have not come into contact with the last generation of terminology, which friends, I suspect in an effort to console me, say I’ve not really missed out on anything- except the blog- of course… and there goes the computer again, underlining it in red. But I’m not so convinced, there are new sayings, greetings and salutations that are sprinkled throughout the world like salt and pepper on Yorkshire pudding in that new language called ‘electronics’.

That is why I am not able to promise that there will be anything in my profile for some time yet, since it will take me more than one sleepless night to figure out how it’s all done.

However, what makes me so enthralled about this electronic diary or ‘blog’ is that once my words have been put on that crystal liquid screen they take off and become dispersed throughout the world, follow their own destiny- perhaps only to end up in a solitary void, unseen and untouched by anyone else- just as they did when I put them under the mattress.