Imagine my shock and embarrassment when I suddenly realised, after 11 years in Sicily, I had never blogged about Mount Etna! Now I have finished clutching my pearls in horror, I am rectifying this oversight forthwith. Mount Etna is Europe’s largest volcano, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is not only the biggest, but the…
Category: Parenting
It’s never easy, yet somehow it’s always fun
Why are these refugees coming to Europe anyway?
I recently moved back to England, partly because I found my dream job, my life’s calling; and equally so that my son could go to school in peace after his school in Sicily fell down. Now that I am back in England I am realising that the level of pity and sympathy for refugees is…
Why I am teaching my son to break the rules
I was chatting on Facebook with a fellow Expat in Sicily recently about how to make children do their homework. I actually don’t think it IS always a good idea. Children need time for hobbies and a social life When my son began school, I used all means possible to make him do his homework,…
Schools and Bridges Collapsing in Sicily: Thanks Mafia!
Here’s a photo of a road in Sicily which collapsed just ten days after it was built. It’s near Mezzojuso, 25 miles from Palermo. It cost more than Euros 200 million – at least, that’s what the taxpayer forked out for it. The actual materials and work, no doubt, cost far less. I don’t know if…
How to Queue-hop in front of a Sicilian
If queue-hopping were an Olympic sport, the Sicilians would win gold every time. Yet recently I beat them at their own game. My son has a massive amount of blood tests. We always go to the same clinic, as the people who work there are my friends. One of the men looks exactly like Johnny…
The Kind of Blogs that Make Money
Since I’m skint, and my part of Sicily has 49% unemployment, I’ve been researching how to make money from blogging. If this doesn’t work, my only option will be to work in one of Sicily’s 1,456,998 Chinese shops selling tiny polyester clothes which smell of mothballs. I’ve found out there are three types of blogs…
So you’re Sicilian. Are you in the Mafia?
“Mummy, why are the baddies English?” my son asked me last week. He was watching “Rio”, a cartoon film about parrots in which the bad parrot, from the Brazilian jungle, inexplicably talks with a very posh English accent. “Well, it’s just one silly cartoon,” I reassured him. Then he listed all the English baddies he…
A new book: SICILIAN CARD GAMES an easy-to-follow guide
‘SICILIAN CARD GAMES an easy-to-follow guide’ gives very clear instructions for twelve Sicilian card games, with photographic illustrations. It is the only book of Sicilian card games in print worldwide. Sicily has its own unique deck of playing cards, and lots of games exclusive to the island. Card games are an indispensable part of the…
Blessed by a Pregnant Nun at Sciacca Carnival
The Carnival of Sciacca in Sicily may not be as famous as the Venice or Rio carnivals, but it is just as much fun. The day started with such heavy rain there was even talk of calling it all off, but in the end the rain stopped and the festivities started. All the children were…
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….
Multicultural Sicily: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ridiculous
This afternoon we went for a walk around central Palermo. In Piazza Politeama we saw these fellows. The man at the bottom was sitting cross-legged on a glass tumbler. All along Via Ruggiero Settimo there were buskers playing drums and guitars, there were fire-breathers and jugglers, there were men on stilts making balloon animals for the…
Festival of St Martin: Time for Children to Drink Wine and Play with Naked Flames
Throughout early November, the weather here in Sicily is often still warm and summery enough to go for a swim in the sea. We Sicilian housewives are still walking about in our boob tubes and hot pants (or something like that) while our poor fellow Europeans, up in Germany and England, are getting wet and…
What do Dead People Eat?
In Sicily, they eat this: It looks like baskets of fruit, but it is all made from martorana, which Sicilians will rush to tell you is nothing to do with marzipan. Martorana is made from ground almonds, sugar and a little water, nothing else. Since Sicilians refuse to use anything except the freshest organic almonds,…
My husband was nearly shot by the Mafia
This event happened when he was six years old, and he lived to tell the tale, obviously. The story startled me, though, as he was so blasé about the whole thing that he only got around to telling me about it last month, after eight years of marriage. He had been hanging about by the…
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…
Padre Puglisi has been Beatified. Can we PLEASE talk about the Mafia now?
In Sicily, if you open your mouth and say something about the Mafia, if you just pronounce the word Mafia in public, the reaction will be sharp intakes of breath all around you and horrified silence. It is a social gaffe even more hideous than meeting your new mother-in-law with your flies undone whilst going…
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…
Stop Giving Children Homework NOW!
This is not something I am writing on a whim. Fair enough, yesterday I went through the trauma of supervising my seven-year-old son while he did his Italian Grammar homework. This was not only traumatic because I didn’t know the right answers. It was also traumatic because he was tired, bored, and doing all he…
Sicilian card games
Sicilians have their own unique playing cards. They look like this: The fishermen in my village are always out on the seafront, playing cards on upturned barrels between their fishing excursions. They all shout loud enough to startle the dead at certain card plays. They smack their winning cards down rather like a butcher hacking…
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…
Are our children beautiful enough?
A while ago, I asked my son what he wants to be when he grows up. “I want to be fat,” he answered without hesitation. “Like the Daddy in the Simpsons,” he explained. “Like Obelix the Gaul,” he emphasised. “Like him”, he exclaimed in delight when he saw Japanese hammer thrower Koji Murofushi in the Olympics….
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…
Photographic talent? …Or maybe not?
In my previous post, I described our weekend visit to Tindari to see the Black Madonna. In compliance with my husband’s Great Economy Drive, a restaurant lunch was forbidden, so we had a picnic here: “This is so romantic!” declared my son, who is 6 years old. He took that photo of the sea (above), and…
God Save us from Hallowe’en!
“My priest said that if I go to a Hallowe’en party I’ll end up in Hell” I was told by a 10-year-old Sicilian girl yesterday. I was helping her put on her ghost costume and apply white make-up to her face, in preparation for the Hallowe’en party that her mother and I were hosting together….
The Dangerously Truthful Diary of a Sicilian Housewife 