Bergman pointed with his very long finger to a corner of the swimming-pool. Beneath the rain-rippled surface of the water an infinity of little organisms, like a Sumerian alphabet, were whirling around at bacterial velocity. Bergman squatted down on his heels and began talking to the tadpoles with a happy smile on his face.
I like skyscrapers Hong Kong and New York are my favourite cities visually and I have lived in Hong Kong and it was very nice to live in such skyscrapers
The size of the problem was illustrated to me recently in conversation with a gentle lawyer from Rome. Conversation had turned, as it does with monotonous regularity, to Berlusconi, and the lawyer confided that he felt assassination was the only way the country would ever liberate itself of the man. He’s normally such a pacifist that I assumed he was joking, but he was serious. He couldn’t see any other way in which the country could get rid of its prime minister. Now I dislike Berlusconi as much as anyone, but I would far rather have him in power than have a return to the bloodshed of the “years of lead” in the 1970s. And yet when a law-abiding, middle-class, Catholic lawyer starts talking quite seriously about armed insurrection you know something is terribly wrong in the country, that it has reached a very dangerous political cul-de-sac.
They didn’t kill us that day. And in the end we drove them mad. We didn’t do anything in particular – I just talked about orchids a lot. And Paul’s continual complaining didn’t go down well either. The day they released us was surreal; they couldn’t take it any more. They just told us to leave. They gave us everything they had taken from us nine months earlier: passports, rucksacks and $3,500 worth of travellers’ cheques.
The problem was, we got lost in swampland and had to go back. They got a guide to lead us out: they kept saying, “We hate you; please go!”
I forget where, but I once read that the scrambled eggs should be cooked so slowly and gently that, for optimum results, a candle would be the ideal heat source.