My daughter Bruna has, she tells us, been seeing rather a lot of my son Romolo lately. At least he’s been coming down to Rome from Siena at weekends to ask her out to dinner and the latest movie of Fellazione or some other old master. I’d be delighted for any daughter of mine to marry any son of mine. I enjoy the movement of life – kids falling in love, performing birds (there was an article on Aderyn the Blind Bird Queen in a popular periodical just after she died), new gelato flavours, ceremonies, anthills, poetry, loins, lions, the music of the eight tuned Chinese pipes suspended from an economically carved and highly stylized owl head at our window facing the lake maddened into the sweetest cacophony by a tramontana that will not abate its passion, the woman below calling her son in (his name is Orlando and she says his father will be furioso), the ombrellone on our roof terrace blown out of its metal plinth, the spitted faraone for dinner tonight with a bottle of Menicocci, anything in fact that’s unincestuous.
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