Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

cinnamon cream.
    Since the purging of the privy I have been more attentive to the terrace and the now unobstructed panorama it affords. I sit out there a good deal these days. The funny thing about a coastline when seen from this distance and altitude is that the sea doesn’t look like water at all but, depending on the weather, more like concrete or blue lino or occasionallysmirched tinfoil. It’s much too far away for actual waves to be visible, which is one of the things that recommended this place to me. Instead at evening, as Viareggio leans wearily away from the sun, one can sometimes see frozen frown-lines in opposition to the prevailing breeze. That is all. The quick white scars left by ships and pleasure craft are obviously some kind of sap or latex that the ocean briefly bleeds when its skin is broken and which hardens almost immediately on exposure to air. This is the view from a terrace I have always wanted.
    How have I allowed myself to engage for a living with that world down there? (‘That world’ of course refers not to the specific gridded quilt of Viareggio’s sprawl and greenhouses but to the cancerous showbiz ethos that today extends over all horizons.) Ghosting the little lives of famous nobodies – was it for this I passed so many A-levels? Maybe it is not too late to become Nietzsche, a cantankerous visionary or secular monk with a kitchen garden full of exotic international pods and legumes. The man with his finger on the pulses of the world … And there you go again: everything has to degenerate into a joke. But of all things, to be making your living – and not a bad one, either – as amanuensis to knuckleheads! And doing it well, what’s more. Doing it so brilliantly these idiots recognize the persona I’ve invented for them, even to the extent that I’m told that ghastly sprinter who now runs for Parliament in elections firmly believes he wrote his book himself ( Alone Out There – don’t bother to read it) while I merely sat taking dictation like one of Barbara Cartland’s stenographers. I suppose I should be flattered. As he’s planning his new political career on the basis of an entirely spurious personality I ought, if there were any justice in the world, to have the last laugh. But of course there isn’t and I shan’t. In politics as in showbiz, bogus wins .
    The worst thing is that when I’m working with them – the awful Luc, the unspeakable Per – I occasionally experience the fleeting conviction that I’m related to them, or at any ratehave known them a very long time. This must be the direst legacy of that distant, ever-present day on the Cobb when I grimly saw (‘grimly see’ being only one of Lyme Regis’s anagrams) my adored elder brother gulped like a tidbit by the Atlantic. Oh, poor Nicky, how I worshipped you! You were, at eleven, everything I aspired to be: big and brave and heroically athletic. Nothing my nine-year-old self could do came anywhere close to measuring up to your daunting example. I even failed to learn your trick of tossing the hair out of your eyes with a gesture that looked so wonderfully casual: a jerk of your neat head punctuating your passage through the world as though dismissing the moment and its achievement. On to the next effortless triumph.
    Of course the trouble with hero-worshipping an elder brother who dies is that you catch him up and overtake him and leave him there, forever eleven and stranded in a golden pool of promise. And when some of your absurder myths about him have likewise been outstripped by sober accuracy and family photos, you recognize what you probably knew all along: that he was actually quite an ordinary little boy, even a bit timorous and weedy, for whom his teachers were predicting an auspicious academic career. Smile, Gerry (another Lyme Regis anagram, lacking only an ‘r’).
    So maybe, by reminding me of a physical prowess I once looked up to, these hellish athletes are a legacy of that rotten day which