London for ever - 35

Chapter IX

A very nice snack bar

In my work place, on Monday, after the Sunday rest, there was always a big mess. Even that Monday, I had a great deal on putting  everything back in order, as it liked me and  was my duty to be done. When I finished it was   almost midday. 

I had  usually lunch  with a  sandwich and a cappuccino. 

In London to find a snack bar where you can have a quick meal at noon is almost easier than  find a pub where to drink  a pint of beer. Provided that one does not want to join meal and beer in a Public House. 

My digestive system, to be honest, has  always recommend me to  frequent pubs only in the evenings, avoiding strictly to have there any kind of meal, especially if in the form of hot dish. 

Certain  Anglo-Saxon names, albeit seemingly to have an edible, bombastic euphony,  may conceal seriously unpleasant  surprises, such as some kind of animal innards, which in normal pastafoglia casings are located vaguely with  colorful vegetables,  cooked and mixed with approximately and squishy sauces, and have a really  indefinable taste and almost  unsustainable smell. 

These snacks, I say, are typically owned by Italian immigrants, not necessarily  men from the south of Italy.
Many of them  left the Italy at the time of the Great War,to escape conscription first and then misery; others in the following  two decades, because of fascism and clumsy arrogance of the royal Italian bureaucracy, which had ended up succumbing to the reasons of the Fascist State. As a matter of fact these nationalist reasons had no connection to men and transcended their  individual needs and rights,  ending for  sacrificeing, paradoxically, even that of the free private initiative, the true soul of the entrepreneurs who had savagely opposed the occupation of factories and the unrest in the streets, which was indeed the   prelude to the takeover of power by the fascist ideology. 

And the more that stood out in comparison with the efficient, impartial and careful administration of British society, always willingly glad  to welcome into it smanufacturing background  those managerial  Italians traders, so keenly skillful  in the restaurant business in a particular way. 

And of  Italy they kept that idea a bit unreal and mythical in their remembrances ,  more due  to  their distant and nostalgic fantasy than the  now unknown reality. And if now, the financial viability of their assets in pounds sterling, suddenly get the memory of past miseries,the veil of nostalgic left however only filter those idealistic visions that the passage of time makes the most idyllic and remote. 

Such memories of first generation immigrants sometimes pull them  to attempt a risky and most frequently, traumatic return, while their children and grandchildren, British born or raised there, misguided by the stereotypes of British press about the mafia, on corruption and the disasters of Italian Finance (all partial true rather than absolute of a reality far more complex and multifaceted), preferred to think of Italy as a place of special holidays, to be  decanted with exotic tones coming back to their new Country, together and apart from the inevitable comments on dysfunction of public and private services, small and large cheating of a people still convinced to be  still under the yoke of Spanish Bourbon Royals or even Austro-Hungarian, culinary delights, the artistic and natural beauties (perhaps abandoned to themselves), led by the iconoclastic Napolitanean  of sun, pizza and sea. 

I mean in this snack-bar down the road I could grab a quickbite and a tea in a short time, in order to be quickly back at work, with roads that soon  would be filled with people around the lunch-time and multiple other purposes. 

In my way to the snack I met Mickle, a funny man already in his seventies, a native of Kent who, pulling  his umbrellas ‘ cart, had started  his  slow praising chant,  among the general indifference of passers-bies. 

I don't know how or why, but whenever I met him in the street with his cart, it always happened that the sky was obscured following a  copious rain, within an hour or  maybe two. So much so,  that someone, perhaps a colleague in the Company, whose interests and profits were evident in inverse proportion to rain and bad weather,  had once  suggested that I would dash through touching  wood . His fame as a jinx, real or alleged it might be, was increased by the fact that he used to  wore black suits; furthermore  he was  always dark on his face, black were his eyes and, despite his age, even his  hair were black. 

35. to be continued...