Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

– see what you missed when you took your eye off the ball there as that high-pressure area came push in in from Mongolia where the Genghis Khan Nirvana Palisades Mansion awaits your exclusive and demanding custom, the first and cutest ten-star hotel ever born in captivity while nuclear crisis talks loom grinning and grinning all over your kaleidoscopic, epilepsy-inducing flickering screens, faster and faster until we whimper prayers for the failure of the global power grid and entertain fantasies of the pampering , pitiless luxury of solitary confinement and total sensory deprivation. And all we ever actually wanted, of course, was footage of the White House aide lying back in his double bed, arguing with the penguin about whose turn it is to make the coffee. That would have set us up nicely for the day.
    A lot of this drivel is visible, reversed out in the bathroom mirror, as I shave. If this is how millions of people begin their day it’s small wonder they’re full of stress and ill informed. I leave the hotel without breakfast, knowing too well what awaits me. Amazing to think that in my lifetime we’ve sunk solow that even in supposedly good hotels guests are now expected to fetch their own breakfast, not to mention put up with a miniature dustbin in the middle of the table for all the nasty little plastic pots, butter wrappers and pieces of foil – and, what is more, join a conspiracy to pretend that this is gracious living. I cross to the station and in the bar have a blissful espresso (why is Italian coffee so distinctively good?) that sends a glow through me and makes me feel I’m home at last. I salute a stalwart group of dungaree-clad workmen beginning their day with croissants and Fernet-Branca and commandeer a taxi to drive me to where I belong. The driver, relieved at not having to do the five-minute run to the airport that he could do – or give a realistic imitation of doing – with his eyes closed, warns me that he expects the trip to cost €90, depending on whether I want him to go via the autostrada where I will also have to pay the toll, or the old Aurelia coast road, which is slower but free. I tell him airily that since I’m an eccentric millionaire I don’t care which way he goes. I then slump back in silence to contemplate exactly what I need to do. First, find a suitable local hotel as a base to work from, then set about discovering what the position of a homeowner is whose house has been reduced to rubble – rubble that I increasingly feel I should search to see what of my former life has survived. There is also the pressing question of insurance. Suddenly having abundant money seems to be making me less fatalistic about Le Roccie. From time to time I glance up from my reverie and finally notice that whenever I have done so I have seen the Leaning Tower, now on our left and later on our right, sometimes leaning towards us and sometimes away.
    ‘Had you maybe thought to leave Pisa at some point this morning?’ I ask with amiable restraint.
    ‘It’s the one-way traffic system.’ The driver unwraps a stick of gum and places it on an extended grey-coated tongue the colour and texture of mouldy bread. We watch one another in the mirror. ‘Also, I’m an eccentric taxi driver.’
    Touché, I suppose. Normally this would provoke Samper tostinging repartee but I am still fighting the influence of BBCNN’s breakfast television. I very much want to be calm. The rest of the world may, if it wishes, dissolve into schizophrenia , frantically whirling to confront a madcap slurry of voices and images. But this is not Samper’s way, especially not after a spell in the cool backwaters of East Anglica where, as we know, feeling you’re whole is deeply refreshing and the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull is quietly auditioning her Pontius Pilates. I therefore renounce all contentiousness with taxi drivers and concentrate instead on my silent plans, which may yet turn out to encompass a certain amount of mayhem