Football and Cataracts

I am not always a football fan. It happens every two years, for the World Cup or Euro Cup, just  like for so many others. But nevertheless, it was fun to go to a Siena football match on Sunday, when they took on Orvieto, and the final score was 1-1. My Texan friend Hettie and I stayed for the first part, and were able to join in the noisy celebrations when Siena scored in the first half an hour. Other friends, Bene, Cecilia, Alexander and Andrew below  were more dedicated and stayed the course. 

Siena had a couple of years in the first division, Serie A, but now they are relegated to the D league I believe... I am hoping a recent acquaintance is going to change that: the Siena football club has been bought by a Swedish former football player called Jonas Bodin whom I met a couple of weeks ago, together with the lady who will be in charge of the Siena ladies' team; Jenny Damgaard.

This was all thanks to my cousin Pelle who read an article about her connection to Siena in the Swedish morning broadsheet Sydsvenskan,  and decided to alert me. I wrote her an email which Pelle sent on to the newspaper and they forwarded to her. By that evening both she and Jonas came here for aperitivos and a chat. 

There are not many Swedes at all here in Siena, so I suppose they might have been a little curious... I am wishing them well in their challenge!

Other important matters would have to include the 12th cataract operation event in Djenne, that also involves the above mentioned cousin Pelle, who with his wife Nanni continues to sponsor a hundred and fifty free cataract operations every year in Djenne. It is number 13 in fact, because one of these events were held in Kayes Medine where my Keita's family came from.  For the first few years Keita was there with us, since he worked at the Djenne hospital, and also since he had himself been active in eye operations, not cataracts, but operations for Trichiasis, also called trachoma. Now the operations a given in his honour and there is always a minutes silence for him at the inauguration ceremony. Below centre is Dra, the Mayor of Djenne, and Keita's best friend. The first person to the left is Dembele, representing our MaliMali association, the figurehead through which the admin of the event takes place. The second is Keita's second son Lassi. I had arranged for the team to pick him up in Segou where he lives, in order for him to be present and feel proud. To the right is Dr. Faira Keita, the head surgeon- a lovely man, totally dedicated to his job. 

There are always hundreds of people arriving from the far distant bush, having walked for days, hoping to be seen and  retrieve their sight. 

The team operated 40 patients yesterday, and here they are this morning, waiting  for a check up before they are allowed to leave.

                                                         And today the team continues!

It has always felt like a huge privilege to be involved in this, and the kindness of this continuing sponsorship by Pelle and Nanni is simply impossible to over estimate. 

 

Deepest January

When more or less nothing happens in Siena...

It rains, it is as cold as London, there is no one in my little mini Pensioni.

Next year I will definitely go away! 

My leg is getting better though, and I am using just one crutch, managing to hobble down to the ONDA Stanzina, where there is at least something happening which makes me feel just marginally useful: the winter mending of the ONDA ceremonial outfits. Ivana, who is in charge, plays lots of old recordings of the ONDA choir.  Mostly male voices  sing lovely, sentimental songs about the Contrada, about Siena and some about love...very Senese, very Italian...

       

One rather lovely thing to do here in Tuscany in Deepest Winter is to go to one of the numerous hot springs, and I did just that yesterday. I took the bus to the little town in the Crete Senese called  Rapolani Terme and spent the day at Terme Antica Querciolaia, a lovely Spa where one floats around in the bath-hot water, or getting pummeled by powerful water jets, while the air temperature is around 3-4 degrees C. The picture below doesn't really do it justice: the lovely thing about it is all the steam that surrounds one when the heat of the water meets the chill of the air, creating a dream like atmosphere.                                                  

                                                             

I speak to no one. 

 I float about listening to fragments of conversations, such as a very long winded one from a group of, I assume, financiers or accountants who talked about nothing but money every time I floated bye; I try and guess the age of a rather splendid looking woman with her handsome, much younger boyfriend; I experience a wave of what must be a long dormant mothering instinct beginning to stir while watching the excitement of a skinny little boy of four or so with his blow up swimming 'wings'; I observe the young, and not so young,  couples smooch and whisper things to each other;

I see so many very Italian faces, so beautiful in that very Italian way: young men who look as if they have just stepped out of a Renaissance portrait.

I will go back next week...

Mal d'Afrique

 My Christmas guests have left.

It is a clear, cold Sunday in Siena, and I am sitting by my Christmas tree listening to Songhoy Blues.

 A feeling of loss is invading me. There are many reasons for this just now, but a significant one is  the   pictures I have received from Djenne which shows the utter destruction of what was once Hotel Djenne Djenno.

 The severe floods this autumn have demolished the mud walls and only ruins remain. The picture above shows the the remains of the Diawando room, which used to stand inside the Great Gate with the two Baobab trees we planted. These are still visible here, one male and one female- I believe the one that looks quite dead is the female, which always shed its leaves only to come back in force later on. 

The Great Gate which stood by the baobabs had fallen long previously. The hotel was handed over on the 1st of July 2017, and I never went back inside its perimetre again, so I don't quite know why these pictures are so hard for me to see.  

This is what remains of the Peul Suite...

I did however go back to Djenne many times, and stayed in my  own house on my land, I even worked in the bogolan studio before I sold it all. This picture shows how my house- to the right-  is collapsing and it is now gone, returned to mud,  says Baba, who used to be my manager at Hotel Djenne Djenno.

I will never have to see this destruction.  

I cannot go back to Djenne. 

I had planned to return in February to be present for  the 15th edition of the cataract operations at the Djenne hospital sponsored by my cousin Pelle and his wife Nanni. I also needed to see the library and its staff who are still working, in a much reduced capacity, with the digitization of manuscripts. I wanted to pick up their work on a hard drive and bring it with me back to Europe. The plan was that I should travel up that road from Bamako again that I have travelled a thousand times - this time in the company of Dr. Faira Keita and his team on their way up to start their cataract operations. 

I received the reply last night- I cannot go with them.  The Department of Health, ultimately in charge of this, has refused to let me travel because of the heightened security risk of carrying a 'toubab' (white person) with them on their journey northwards. 

I cannot use the local bus, which I did many times before- because the check posts will not let me pass... The only possibility would be a privately hired car with a military escort, prohibitively expensive.

And Bamako? Karen will have left to live in Senegal. There is hardly anyone remaining- the Sleeping Camel, that lively watering hole for most of the English speaking sections of Bamako expats, is now largely deserted, there having been a mass exodus of UN staff, NGO workers, and diplomats from Mali. 

That is not the entire reason for  the Minor Key that I feel  is surrounding me. The sale of my flat in London, which I thought was well on the way to be completed by Christmas, has run into serious difficulties because of some technical details and it looks as if it will fall through. 

I spent nearly two weeks there in December, hobbling around with my broken knee, packing everything up. Who knows what will happen now.. 

Nevertheless, it was a lovely Christmas here  with dear friends Jeremiah, David and Sanjay... but their exit reinforces this unaccustomed  feeling of loss...

Kama Sutra +

 Here we have, just for David (who  asked for it in the previous comments)  the front page of the Nazione, where, on the left hand side, the Misericordia of San Gimignano is lauded for their excellent  and swift  arrival and ability to bring the drama of my previous post to a happy conclusion, taking me to the Poggibonsi  A&E:

                                                         

 And here is, for everyone's delectation, a Close -Up of my Kama Sutra Pyamas:

                                                                                                   Looks exhausting.....

A Tuscan mishap..

                                                     

Yes, well, it was a cool,  blue-skied,  shining,  autumnal Sunday, and we - the trekking group I belong to - had congregated in a gorgeous green field from which we could see the towers of San Gimignano silhuetted against the sky. We happily set out on our 13k trek.

It didn't last all that long for me however... a skip across a little forest stream- arriving safely on the other side; then at the next, easy, step up the forest path my foot was entangled in a layer of  trecherous fine  roots; I went flying forward and smashed my left knee against a rock...

                                                                                 

It quickly became evident that I would not be able to carry on, I would have to be lifted out of there! Emergency services were called, with some difficulty because we had strayed out of  easy coverage. 

I eventually found myself strapped to a stretcher and was carried to the waiting ambulance which stood about 800 m. from the accident spot. 4 Heroic volunteers from the San Giminano MISERICORDIA, the  Italian  social/health services as well as 4 fellow walkers took on the task of carting me up the steep hill ascent.   The event got front page position in the local paper La Nazione in the morning.                                                      

I spent 5 nights in Poggibonsi hospital where they operated on my broken knee cap. 

                                                                                 

Back home again last Friday night, this time transported by another Misericorda team, who were laughing at my pyamas which they had time to notice because the journey took a while and eyes had time to stray...  My Karma Sutra pyamas was given me once a long time ago by Giulietta, when I was about to go in to hospital for some other reason...It never fails to amuse me that people don't notice what the pattern is.                                                  

Back home there was dear Patty who had come down from Bologna to help me for a few days. Soon arrived three, four other friends from the walking group and  a couple of  theatre friends- it became quite a jolly  party!

And today Patty left, and I am starting to look after myself- but I  and my crutches are
already able to go and have a cup of coffee and a croissant at the bar St. Pietro!

                                                                                   

Talamone, Venice, Carloforte...

 

A lot of travelling has taken place in the last couple of weeks, because I have found myself able to get away- my guests have been staying for a few days, or even weeks, therefore I have not had to greet new guests every day and make sure everything is running properly, but have left my guests to look after themselves. 

The first outing was to a little town called Talamone on the southern Tuscan coast, which |I wanted to visit, because according to the people at ONDA, this town is an honorary outpost of the Onda Contrada: When we won the Palio in July there was an Onda flag flying from the ancient ramparts of the fortress above. 

There is some truth in this story: at the height of the Siena Republic a large part of the Tuscan coast was controlled by Siena, and Talamone was the main port. The military company of the Onda Contrada was dispatched to fortify the town, and this is why we are called the ONDA, the Wave, and we have a Dolphin/Sea Monster on our flag and the motto:

Il colore del Cielo, La Forza del Mare:

The Colour of the Sky and the Strength of the Sea.

However... I was a little disappointed with the Talamonians enthusiasm about Siena and their supposed Onda membership... Instead I found out, from speaking to the owner of the main restaurant i town that  they counted themselves  tightly bound with Grosseto, the largest town in the Maremma, and had no particular feelings about Siena at all... and they were not aware of any Onda flag on the ramparts...

Well, nevermind. I had a lovely autumn swim in the still warm waters in the lovely rock bay below the castle. 

A few days later saw me arriving in Venice to meet my frienda Patty and Les:

 

We visited the Biennale where we were  impressed by the French Pavilion and its artist Julien Creuzet: 

And the American Pavilion was good fun with its onslaught of colours and patterns by the Native American artist Geoffrey Gibson. 

The pretentious blurb introducing the artist made us giggle and inspired us for the remainder of our visit in Venice to make up a whole new vocabulary along the same lines as the below: 

The artist apparently 'confronts the chromophobia of contemporary art with his use of pattern and abstract geometries'. Is anyone aware of any Chromophobia in contemporary art??

                                                     

           And the last in my Trilogy of Autumn journeys took me to Carloforte, the lovely little island off the southern Coast of Sardinia:                                                                            

     

where I met up with my friends Eva and Leonardo again, and helped harvest the olives from their 100 olive trees: a bountiful harvest this year!

                                                    

ONDEPENDENCE DAY

It has been a long time... I have been very busy, mainly in fun and frivolity. To win the Palio unleashes  several months of festivities, culminating in a week long crescendo, which we are living just now, in the ONDA territory. Last Saturday we had what is called the Festa nel Rione which is always a huge fancy dress affair, involving the whole neighbourhood which is sectioned off into various groups with various tasks and themes. 

Since we on the Palio on the 4rth of July, it became a Huge American Party- I was part of the 50's themed Drive In and American Diner section- here below my fellow girls:

I had spent a week or so turning my bedroom floor into a painting studio, making the Drive-In banner 

which was strung across the Via del Sambuco.

I also made the poster for the film showing in the Drive- In that night- it was of course the winning race projected on the wall of the building- and here I am with the fantino (the jockey) who was part of another group- the Avenger Superheroes...

      The streets of the Onda were thronging with about 800 people, mostly part of the Contrada and dressed in their various themed costumes:  there was the Prohibition section down one narrow dimly lit alley way where flappers were dancing with gangsters to the tune of a jazz band playing 20s and 30s music; there was the Hell's Angel Section, with three Harley Davidsons making their entrance down the Via Giovanni Dupre at the opening of the party; there was the   section where George Washington and his group were signing the Declaration of Ondependence dressed in eighteenth  century costumes and wigs: there were Hippies and there were Punks, which I thought was maybe pushing the theme a little in the wrong direction, since Punks were actiually a London thing, really...but nevermind..

There was the 70s Disco section, and the American High school section and ...and... and...

for a taste of it: 

https://www.facebook.com/reel/847924827513927

I have always complained that noone really does proper parties (apart from Cressida Bell) and if I want to have a party I have to organize it myself... and I have done, although it was a very long time ago now, in fact it was the French Revolution Party that I did in my flat in Paris in 1989...

Well, I have now ended up, obviously, where I am supposed to be. I take my hat off unconditionally- it was absolutely the best party I have ever been to. There were two girls from Brazil staying in my Airbnb, they live in Rio de Janeiro and they said they had more fun than at the Rio Carnival...                     

                               Below  my friend Carmen and I at the entrance to Via Giovanni Dupre, before it all started...    

                                           

And on Saturday there is the Victory Banquet on the Piazza del Mercato with around 800 people, and THE HORSE TABACCO in the place of honour....!

Perhaps thankfully this sort of seemingly inexhaustible merry making only happens when a Contrada wins the Palio, and some have not won for more than thirty years...