Diary – 6 November 2004

On Friday morning I was drinking a cappuccino in the Piazza del Gesu in Naples with my friend Angus. The sky was free from clouds, the streets were free from other tourists, and no one seemed to care that I had parked my car illegally, facing the wrong way in the middle of a busy taxi rank. At 10.30 a group of men with mandolins materialised and started strumming along as a tiny, red-faced woman belted out folk songs. Within seconds they had an audience of more than 100: young women with pushchairs, grandmothers shaped like baked potatoes, men with cashmere cardigans slung carefully over their shoulders. There were at least 20 different colours of quilted jacket, including peach. For half an hour, the crowd sang along happily, clapping and holding their photo-phones above their heads. Every passer-by knew every word to every folk song. I tried to imagine ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ having the same effect in Leicester Square, and failed.

Lying on a camp bed in the Albergo Candy, I took my mind off the vole-sized lumps in the pillow by re-reading my favourite postcard by the light of the single, naked bulb. It is printed by the World Youth Alliance, and on the back, in pale-blue type, it says, ‘We affirm that the family is a school of deeper humanity, within which each member learns best what it means to be a human person. Within the family, children first come to understand their own intrinsic and inviolable human dignity. Through their complementary roles, mother and father, equal in dignity, show their children that the freedom of the human person is most fully and rightly lived in the gift of self.’

In the afternoon we drove from Hotel Candy to Hell.