In search of roots

Well, my earliest memories stretch back to another continent, to another era and it has remained a family tradition that the quiet three-year-old, that I was back then, started to speak during the month-long voyage back to Europe. From a linguists point of view I am still trying to analyse this. Had the mandarin nannies come with us, what language would those words have been in? My mother and sister are the only ones who spent the 14 years (during the 1950s and 1960s) in Hong Kong trying to integrate with local people rather than dominate them and they mastered a lot of the sounds if not the pictograms.

Next stop was Rome, but before the sweet smell of a new kind of mandarin, that of madarin peels, could settle it was Paris and then onto a Brussels posting for my dad with in tow.
I spent the next 13 years of my life growing up under the grey "manneken pis" sky… wondering whether the national symbol had anything to do with being constantly wet!

30 years have passed and I have spent the last 20 here on the Med drying out and looking at the sparkling blue above and beyond (the seafront is a stone's throw away from most buildings in this southern Italian town) And now I have to come to terms with the other extreme of efficiency, far from the grey clouded central European capital, the frenzied inefficiency of the marvellous Italian way of life!