1. Thou shalt not double park if thou can find somewhere to triple park instead. 2. Thou shalt not, never, ever stop to let anyone out of a side road in front of thee, unless thou fancy them a lot. 3. Thou shalt always leave rosary beads dangling distractingly off thine rear view mirror to…
Category: Humorous
Sicily’s always good for a laugh!
Happy Valentine’s Day with some Kinky Chocolate
Sicilians are a romantic lot and they love St. Valentine’s Day. Rather than give their girlfriend sweets or champagne, most Sicilian men are more likely to take her out for a delicious organic Italian ice-cream. What better way to wish all my readers Happy Valentine’s Day than by sharing this marvellous advertisement I saw in our local…
Does your child know more than you do?
Mine does. He’s eight. People often comment on how much he knows about animals and their evolution. A few days ago I was watching a film with him in which this bizarre little animal appeared: “That’s a honey badger,” he told me immediately. “They love eating honey but they sometimes attack lions to steal their…
Big Brother Is Watching You
Until recently, in my part of Sicily, owning an iPhone was so cutting edge and high-tech that it was basically one step away from being an astronaut. In a culture where speaking is impossible without bilateral full-arm gesticulation, it was fairly obvious that talking to people using just two thumbs would feel far too restrictive….
Christmas in Sicily with Santa’s Smallest Elf
We celebrated Christmas this year with roughly forty people. I could not count accurately as they were Sicilian, therefore unable to keep still. There were four different pasta courses. One was spaghetti with olive oil, lemon zest and cheese, served in a bowl carved out of a whole Parmesan cheese. Another pasta course was with…
Dancing in the Street with a Homeless Nigerian
I ended up dancing in the street with a Nigerian tramp yesterday. (Tramp means “homeless person”, in case you’re American.) How does a Sicilian Housewife end up acting so weird? Well, it started with some Christmas shopping. I find this activity traumatic, for three reasons. 1. Almost all toys in Sicily are made in China…
The Signs of Maturity
Today I was waiting at the traffic lights and a truly gorgeous dark-eyed hunk of a young man stopped half way across the road, bent down to look at me through the windscreen, and gave me a very friendly wave and a dazzling smile. Then off he dashed, his golden-brown biceps clenching in the autumn…
The Hanging Gardens of Bagheria
The legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. They were supposedly created by the Emperor Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon, for his Persian wife, Queen Amytis. We have a hanging garden in my home town in Sicily, too, and this post has photos of it. The…
The Sicilian Art of Arranging Yourself
Have you ever wondered how you’d cope if you were stranded in the wilderness with nothing useful at all? Tom Hanks in “Castaway” lived on a desert island for several years, using an ice-skate as a multi-purpose cutting tool, part of a heinously tasteless party dress as a fishing net, and a football with a face…
Come to Italy and meet Mickey Rat and Donald Goose
One day, when I went to collect my son from school, a rat eight inches long was spotted sprinting across the playground. Being Sicilian, the mothers knew how to do “hysterical” with great virtuosity. Yet they were calling the rat a “mouse.” Let’s weigh this up. Mice are fairly harmless compared with rats. People even have…
Top Tips for Renting a Car in Sicily and not getting Killed in it
Part umpteen of an occasional, hysterical series on DRIVING IN SICILY Car rental in Sicily is quite a surprising experience for most people the first time around. Firstly, it is blood-curdlingly expensive. The insurance will be exorbitant but heaven help you if you opt out of that! If you book online, or even if you…
THE GODMOTHER of Sicily, and how to message her on the Auntienet
I’m excited to find, in mid-2013, that my blog is approaching 1,000 subscribers. I do hope you’re all enjoying it! My readers come from exciting places all over the world. Their blogs are in many language and scripts, some of which I don’t recognise. I even have a subscriber called जागरण मिडिया सेन्टर, and I…
What did YOU do with your milk teeth?
One of my little boy’s milk teeth fell out recently. He now has two outsize grown-up size teeth at the centre of his mouth, and a space each side of them. He looks like a rodent. “Do you want to leave it under your pillow for the tooth fairy?” I asked him. “Or do you…
The Mediterranean Diet – how to do it properly
All over the world, there exists the myth of a “Healthy Mediterranean Diet,” which everyone is urged to emulate for the sake of their arteries. The Mayo Clinic (which always makes me think of Mayonnaise, anyone else?) says on its website: “Mediterranean diet: Choose this heart-healthy diet option” A cursory search on the Internet will…
Riding in a Car made of Sticky Tape
I attended a vehicular funeral last week. My friend Totò, a bright-eyed and sprightly septuagenarian, had a maroon Alfa Romeo which was, basically, made of sticky tape. I don’t mean trashy thin stuff, I mean the top quality wide, brown parcel kind. By the time I had seen his car enter the final, declining years…
Can you smell that pong of broken glass? A really rubbishy blog post
My town has 56,339 inhabitants. This morning, when I opened the window, it smelt as if every single one of them had just farted. The noxious gases billowed in and tinged the kitchen air a mustardy pea green. The whiff was coming from the local sewage works, whose manager feels that complying with health and…
21 Mafia arrests and 2 Mafia murders in my town last week
They arrested 21 Mafiosi in my little backwater of a town last week. All of them had been very high profile players in international organised crime. Along with the 21 arrests, the police also recovered 30 million Euros in cash, buildings, businesses, supermarkets, and other varied loot. The men had been engaged in drug trafficking,…
Would you marry your cousin? All about inbreeding, and very small elephants
A lot of Sicilians would. In fact, a lot of them do. Of course Albert Einstein is the Poster Boy for cousin marriage. Not only were his parents cousins, but he also went ahead and married his own cousin. His wife was either his first cousin or his second cousin, depending which parent you trace…
How did YOU find this blog?
I have been rummaging through the statistics for my blog today. When I was new to this blogging lark, I did it obsessively. Nowadays I just take an occasional look at the search engine terms which have brought new visitors to my blog. One of the strings typed into Google that immediately jumped out at…
International Joke Day
My little boy had a fantastic idea yesterday: We should institute an International Joke Day. This is a day when everyone tells every one else a great joke, to cheer up the whole world. I think he is a genius, and so I officially declare that tomorrow, Monday 22 April, is International Joke Day. IF…
La Traviata and the Italian Art of being ill Dramatically
Sorry I haven’t written any posts for so long. I’ve been too busy mopping up puke. My little boy has vomited almost every day for the last three months. The house smells like a bleach factory, and I am buying new mops from the local hardware store so often that the cashier there thinks I…
Sicilian Women Are Scrubbers
Honestly. They spend more time scrubbing, washing and generally sanitising things than they do in any other activity, save possibly ironing. This year, I am joining in the spirit of things by spring cleaning early. I didn’t want to, but my Mother-in-law made me. I admit the place has become a little grimy but, frankly,…
Urgent! I need some Ancient Romans to build me an Aqueduct
We have no running water to our house any more. The reason is that some of the other people in our street haven’t paid their water bills for over eight years. So the water board cut off the water to the whole street. One thing I’d first like to say is, thank the Lord this…
The Top 5 causes of Death in the Home: Doing Housework
I electrocuted myself yesterday. I was cleaning the toaster and I forgot to unplug it first. That’s what having a seven-year-old with verbal diarrhoea and real diarrhoea, both at once, can do to your mental faculties. Whilst emptying the equivalent of three whole loaves of bread, transformed into burnt offerings, out of the bottom of…
We Sicilians Want Some Privacy, Capeesh?
Yesterday, someone in Belarus hacked into my Facebook account. What did the Slavonic sod want? What did he find out about me? I have images of him in my head, in his standard-issue East European shell suit trousers, toasting his friends with a bottle of Stolichnaya in one hand and a samovar full of beetroot…
Wildfire, Deaths and Tomato Sauce Everywhere: A day in Lercara Friddi, Sicily
I posted some photos of the hair-raising electrical wiring in Lercara Friddi last week. I feel I should do the place justice by showing a more complete picture… so here goes. Hubby and I went there shortly after the annual festival celebrating the town pie, the pantofola. Pantofola means slipper. They still had some left…
Sicilian Electrical Wiring and other Health and Safety Issues
I’ve been meaning to write about Sicilian electricians for a while. I needed to accumulate a good set of photos, though, as pictures speak louder than words. Sometimes, in fact, they scream while shuddering all over, with their hair standing up on end, fizzing with 240 volts. While I was taking this photo, the resident of…
Hints and Tips on Driving in Sicily: Roads, and other Sicilian Driving Hazards
PART UMPTEEN OF AN OCCASIONAL, HYSTERICAL SERIES We have had torrents of rain for the last week. As a result, driving my son to school has been permanently upgraded from a Level 2 to a Level 1 risk activity. This is because of the new holes that have formed in the road. I do have a…
This is Not over: The Befana is Coming!
In England, Christmas and New Year and all that jazz are pretty much over now. People are ready to think about diets and other unpleasant stuff. Not in Italy. Oh no! The 6th of January is La Befana, the festival more religiously known as Epifania or Epiphany. Christmas gluttony ain’t over till she’s been! This…
Is Autumn EVER going to come?
“I can’t wait for the leaves to turn red and golden and purple when Autumn comes” my little boy announced a few days ago. “Er, they won’t go purple” I said. “Yes they will,” he insisted. “We’re doing Autumn at school and we wrote a poem about the leaves going purple.” Upon investigation of his…
Have we got too many immigrants?
Immigration is a hot topic in most developed countries. Apparently the Latino element in the USA turned out to vote for Obama in record numbers and are now asking for immigration policy reforms, to legitimise their not-so-legal relatives as formally recognised US residents. Olé! These people are mainly economic migrants, though. In Sicily, we get…
The Black Madonna of Tindari
Yesterday we went to Tindari in Eastern Sicily, famous for its statue of a black Madonna with a black baby Jesus. Like most of the “black Madonna” statues from places where the majority of the population is white, she is carved out of wood, and so was originally light-skinned. Wood darkens over time so, eventually,…
The Dangerously Truthful Diary of a Sicilian Housewife 