Florentine Walkways

In Florence, where I have been in the past week, the pavements are quite slender on many of the older streets. Two people can maybe, barely, walk abreast if they know each other really well. I found this to be quite a wind up. Not that I want the Florence Planning Department (or whatever they have there) to make the footpaths wider.That would be silly. Rather that it presents yet another opportunity to witness the selfish, myopic manners of the Human Race in all its dubious glory.

As one of several leftovers from the Pandemic, I have become conditioned to behave myself pretty well when I’m out for a walk. As learned during Covid, I will fall in behind the person I am walking with, allowing lots of space for the two people coming the other way to pass without any contact being made. I think it’s something I might have even done before 2020 but I’m not sure about that. Either way, I give some respect and I hope for a little in return. As you probably know, I hope in vain.

My experience is that people are worse now than they were pre-Covid. Loving couples, conspiring grannies, teens, tweens, and everybody else all seem to need to claim the highway as their own. My getting out of their way is a given. They obeyed during the crisis and now they will obey no longer. They storm through my throwback gesture as if it is their God-given right that they maintain their formation at all costs.

This effect is magnified on the slender pavements of Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, where tourists amble shoulder to shoulder and step aside for no man, especially me.

Those who know me a little will probably know that this can, and does, piss me off mightily. I will give way to you all day long, I will allow you all the space you need, no problem. But don’t presume – never presume – that you are somehow superior to me because I do it. You are not and I won’t bloody have it. If you can’t give a little too, just a little, then I will become quietly belligerent. I will firm up my shoulder and give up the percentage of the footpath that I am righteously required to give up and if you, the oncoming pedestrian, can’t do the same for me, then you will find me and my shoulder a rather immovable force.

This, then, is the context for how I tended to behave on the beautiful streets of Florence. Giving way, not being given way to, side stepping, colliding, swearing under my breath, swearing over my breath and generally being a considerable pain-in-the-arse.

“You’re going to have to get over it,” Patricia quietly suggests, as she echoes the final line of Chinatown by gently reminding me, “it’s Florence." She’s right, of course, and over the span of the days I spent there, I eased into things a little. Once even easing so far out on the edge of the footpath that I got clipped on the hand by the wingmirror of a high-speed resident car as it passed. This provoked another seventies movie reference as I unthinkingly did my best Dustin Hoffman, “Hey, I’m walking here!” or words to that effect.

Pavements aside, Florence was wonderful. I loved it.

I’m a sucker for artist names. When studying Art History in secondary school, we did a lot of Renaissance stuff. As a result, if two marvelous artworks are positioned side by side in a gallery and one of them is by a name I recognise, then I will be all over that one as the masterwork, even though I have no real visual information or knowledge to confirm that for myself. I have only the name and, for me, the name is enough.

One highlight was happening upon familiar (and famous) names on out-of-the-way walls in out-of-the way churches. A Giotto crucifix sitting nonchalantly in the corner at the side of an altar, a Botticelli painting tucked inconspicuously behind a bank of glittering candles. These things brought joy and excitement and a drive to turn to the family next to you and say, “do you know what that is?” A refreshing change from muttering, “get out of the fucking way.”

Santa Croce, for me, was the best visit. The scale of the work on view, the beauty and peace of the cloisters, the simple grandeur of the Brunelleschi chapel. If you’re going to a few places in Florence, I would make that one of them. The Duomo, I found a bit disappointing. The force of the exterior in the context of the city is undeniable but the inside of the church is rather bare and unwelcoming. Unlike Santa Croce, the seats are not available to sit on, the art cannot be paused over and considered. It is an edifice and they’re not my favourite things, I guess.

We saw and did lots of great things. I could tell you about them, but a guidebook can do that. I wanted to just write about the pavements and the little battles I had there because, when I open this up in future years, and I remember that part, I will hopefully remember all the other parts too.

And, just in case I don’t, it was a great time, Ken.

Really great.

Be Polite, Learn Loads

The other morning, Patricia was heading out the door to work. We sometimes walk down together, as her office is on the way to mine. This morning, however, she was a few minutes ahead of me in the preparation stakes, so she was going on ahead.

As she was heading out the door, I impulsively called after her to be polite and to learn loads and we both shared a grin at that. Then she was off.

When the boys were small and heading out to the car to be driven to school, usually by me, Patricia would give them each a hug to send them on their way and she would leave them with the same piece of advice every day.

“Be good, be polite, learn loads and have fun.”

I’m not sure where it came from, apart from being a sound set of advisories on which to start any school day. It was always dispensed in a light-hearted, knowing, sort of a way and, one senses, it was received in much the same manner. Now that the guys are adults, the advice is still occasionally revived as they set off back to where they live now or when Christmas is over, and it is time to say farewell for a little while. It’s become a sort of a mantra, said with a shared smile. A warm little ritual.

Memory begets memory. It was only when I did my little resurrection of this parting advice the other morning that it came to me that my own mother used to also have a doorstep routine. Something she would invariably do as I was being packed off out the door to school in the morning. It had quite slipped my mind. Indeed, parts of it have still slipped my mind. But I’ll tell you what I recall and probably misremember.

I remember the ending really well. The part about the road. I’ll come to that. First there was the plastic holy water font on the wall at the side of the front door. A souvenir of Knock Shrine, it had a tiny, tiny basin at the bottom of a representation of a celebrated apparition and in this little well sat a tiny prismatic sponge which had long dried up of any alleged supernatural liquid. Still, undaunted by such details, I would reach up and dip my finger in and sketch a sign of the cross around my frontage. This face-blessing made up the start of the doorstep incantation. “’Name of the father, son, holy spirit…” said at breakneck speed so that it came out like one long word.” I’m a bit hazy about the next bit. The idea was that it was something I would say, with Mum’s encouragement, rather than something she would say to me. As I type these words, those other words from fifty-five years ago start to ease more into focus.

“Bless me and save me and protect me, and make me a good boy, and make me better, and mind me crossing the road.”

Yes, I think that’s pretty much it.

It sounds rather naïve now and hyper-religious but, as a family, we were neither of those things. We were pretty worldly, in our own way, even though the rituals and observances were still holding firm for at least another while. The doorstep ‘prayer’, to my mind, was less of a religious declamation and more of a simple mechanism to say, “You have a good day and mind yourself out there.”

Did my older brothers and younger sisters get this ritual too? I imagine they did. I must check in with them and see.

I wonder how many households had such early morning interactions. If the only two families I have ever been a part of both had one, then maybe it was quite a commonplace thing. If so, I never really hear it mentioned.

If I remember the effect correctly, it felt like been given a little bit of armour against the day. School had its challenges, as a small person, and every little helped. With our own kids, I would say it was less that and more a simple touch of positive reinforcement. Confirmation that they were being seen and that somebody wanted them to be the very best they can. If that’s the case, I’d say it worked out pretty well for them.

As for me, well the remnants of any religious inclination have long-evaporated, rather like the holy water in the sponge in the door-side font. But some vestige of memory lives on. A dim impression of being sent out into the world armed with some care and some regard, secure in the knowledge that I would be welcomed back in again when my day was finally done.

Isn’t that a little of what religion offers too?