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.
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.
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...
