Five reasons why I've been in a bad mood today.

1. I had to get up at 6am . My body definitely preferred the idea of 7am.

2. When I got up, the debris of last night's dinner was still in the kitchen. It was a very fine dinner of pork and sage involtini served with apple sauce and fried potatoes, but in a 6am reprise it didn't smell so fine. The Cleaning Up Fairies hadn't done their thing. Maybe they're feeling under-appreciated. Maybe they joined a union.

3. I had to face yet another idiotic Italian bureaucratic hurdle. By June 1 we're all supposed to have traded our crappy little cardboard health cards for spiffy plastic ones with a magnetic strip. It's to stop us committing pharmaceutical fraud. But my mother hasn't been sent her plastic card because she's still on probation as an Italian resident. Well, you know, 82 years old, with delinquent tendencies. You can't be too careful. So she's about to enter Health System Limbo.
The pharmacist said, 'She'll have to go to the Agenzia delle Entrate and explain.'
I said, 'My mother's going nowhere. Not even to the bathroom. Those are her opiates you just dispensed.'
We just stood and kind of glared at each other for about twenty seconds. It's not the pharmacist's fault, I know. It's just the prospect of yet another encounter with one of those government-employed dead fish impersonators. Whimper.

4. I didn't do any piano practice AGAIN.

5. My office looks like a yard sale.

But my mood is now lifting because Mr F bought clams for dinner and we had a nice drink on the terrace while we kvetched about our respective days. And now it's 9.30pm, so even though I'm a grownup and everything I can decently go to bed.
Smiley face.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I warned in an earlier posting, give lizards an inch and they'll take a mile. Not content with the crumbs that fall from our terrace table, a little green lizard has taken up residence in our kitchen. I guessed what had happened when our cleaning lady shouted 'Eeeeek!' and swore a mouse had just crossed her path. We're too high for mice. They'd have to be mice with oxygen cylinders and Olympic-girth thighs.

'No. no,' I said. 'It will be one of Mr F's scaley buddies. And this morning, as I thundered into the kitchen, there he was, in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor, resting his eyes. He be chillin', I froze.
'Well,' I thought, 'I can wait for that cup of tea. No reason to disturb the little guy.'
And I tiptoed away. So it seems I too have caught a bad case of Animal Crackers.

At lunch one of Kitchen Lizard's many friends and relations peeped out from his terracotta duplex, detected Mr F's egg salad and approached the table. I didn't get the egg salad today. I went for the baked beans on toast. Hell, the family that lunches together doesn't always have to eat the same stuff. So Outdoor Lizard got to sample eggs and beans. In fact he was so full of Human Comfort Food that an ant, that should by rights be Numero Uno on any Lizard Lunch Menu was able to sashay slowly past him crying 'Na-na-na-na-na. You're too stuffed to eat me!'

And then. And then , Dr Fitzpatrick Doolittle was heard to muse, 'Ants. I wonder whether they like egg salad too?'
Oh if he could only talk to the animals.
Never mind. I can tell you what the word is out on the tiles.
'Get yourselves round to the Fitzpatricks. They just opened an automat.'

Posted by Laurie Graham at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Venetians aren't very excitable people. You rarely see anything here approaching Neapolitan levels of cussing, arm-waving or knife-brandishing. But one thing they are passionate about is the right way to cook Risi e Bisi. Every Venetian woman is convinced she is the sole repository of the authentic recipe.

Risi e Bisi, a soothingly sloppy pea risotto, is a spring dish. It used to be what the Doge had for dinner on St Mark's Day. Frankly you can make it at any time of the year using those tiny, sweet, flash-frozen peas and indeed I've made it that way in New York in November with no complaints, but the tradition is to use fresh spring peas from the lagoon island of Sant'Erasmo and as the vegetable boats are now bringing crates of them in every morning I decided today was our day for the real thing.

Signora Puziol, from whom I bought my peas at 7.30 this morning, uses onion but no bacon. Signora Toso, who wrote one of my Venetian cookbooks, insists on bacon but never mentions onion. And one rogue recipe I was given included fennel seeds. Fennel seeds? Surely the point is to taste the peas?

Peas are one of those Proustian madeleines for me. My grandad used to grow them and on Sunday mornings I'd sit with him in his garden and shell them, no more than an hour between harvesting and cooking. Sometimes there were tiny potatoes too, with skins so tender you could rub them off. My grandmother was never party to any of this vegetable preparation. She was usually indoors, either trying to rectify her latest slip-up with a home permanent kit or planning the next assault on her hair. Anyway, those peas were so delicious an awful lot of them didn't make it to the kitchen. I can almost taste them now. Almost.

So you shell the peas and simmer the pods for an hour with water, garlic and parsley to create a broth. Then you soften a chopped onion in melted butter, add the peas and a little hot broth, and after about five minutes you add the rice and proceed as for any other risotto. Which brings me to today's big question. Arborio rice or Vialone Nano? Arborio is very fashionable, I know, but it's an unforgiving rice. Leave it for two minutes while you answer the phone and it turns to sulking glop. Personally I'm a Vialone Nano woman but Doge Fitzpatrick loves Arborio and as this is his first day off work in aeons and his poor old ankles are crying for mercy, Arborio he shall have.

And when the risotto is cooked it shall be anointed with more butter, and rested for as long as it takes to dust it with freshly grated Parmesan and open a bottle of Pinot Grigio, and peas shall reign. Verily.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many novelists, in the interests of getting things right, spend long hours in musty library stacks. I, on the other hand, am a charter member of the Magpie School of Research. I collect little odds and ends that catch my eye or my ear and when it comes to sitting down with a mountain of reference books, I skitter through them as fast as I can. It's the flavor I'm after not the full seven course banquet. And I'm always amazed when the facts turn round and threaten me with a friendly nip on the ass.

After THE FUTURE HOMEMAKERS OF AMERICA was published I met a USAF widow whose experience had been uncannily like that of one of my characters. And years ago, doing the rounds promoting my transvestite novel, THE DRESS CIRCLE, I found myself seated in Make-Up next to a tranny husband (and boy, was he having fun) who turned to me and asked, 'How did you know about me and my Debbie? We've never told anybody our story before.'
This year's book, now put to bed and soon to be published in the UK, includes the story of a frontal lobotomy and the havoc it wrought on Rose Marie Kennedy, the forgotten sister of JFK. So before writing THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING KENNEDY I did my due diligence on elective brain surgery and learned a bit about the frontal lobe. But, duh! It didn't help me recognise what's been happening to my mother these past six months. The tumor rampaging through her brain has performed a kind of in-house frontal lobotomy and stripped her of her personality.

Now I understand why I feel exhausted. It's not so much the lifting and turning, and feeding and cleaning. Actually, there's something very satisfying about doing those things. It's the repeated, futile attempt to get a reaction, any reaction that is so wearing. A banging door, a dozen of her favorite roses, an infected toe nail, another day of slaughter in Iraq, the touch of a loving granddaughter gently brushing her hair. No joy, rage, gratitude or despair. Everything is the same. The evidence was right under my nose and I failed to see what it meant.

Well now I see. And I feel such relief. It's nothing personal. And it's no reflection on my nursing skills. The fact that I'm known in the family as Mildred Ratched II is neither here nor there.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just when I thought we were over Liberation Day and I could dust off my To Do list, along came May Day, yet another excuse to close offices, tear up bus schedules and generally reduce Italy to a dusty, shuttered standstill. Next year they should simplify everything and just close the country for the month of April. And the Communists had their flags out yesterday, of course. Isn't it extraordinary that grown men, aware of 20th century history, can parade beneath a hammer and sickle banner without a shudder of shame?

They say God sends us what we need, not what we desire. It's the kind of platitude I'm sure I've let drop without being in any position to check its truth. Well this week God sent me Vittorio Cimarosto, an ageing rockabilly, a retired nurse turned back-yard farmer. Vittorio, brought to me by a long chain of happpenstance, is now helping me care for my mother through the final weeks of her life. He lifts her, turns her, bullies her, massages her, wheels her out for ice cream, brings her new-laid eggs, gets a smile out of her. He seems to know a hundred little wrinkles for making the lives of his patients more comfortable. He believes in working to the eleventh hour fifty ninth minute to fill what remains of their life with grace.
And I'll tell you something else. He wasn't closed for May Day.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)