Rant Roma Regarding - The Defence

Ok. I've had the impression that this team was headed for dark times the moment I saw what choices they'd made on the mercato. I mean, Adriano's been made fun of so often that his mother is beginning to think of bringing it to legal terms, but that's not the point. Management philosophy says: FOLLOW THE GLITZ. And so they purchased a forward, and a star. This was, well, how to put this? A fuck-up. It reminds me of that time I sat under a bridge in Newcastle with some friends taking bets on who the seagulls would take a shit on first. The correct mercato moves, as I saw it, were a decent substitute for Riise (the guy has a face a bit like one of those reptiles you see in South America) and a real star in the midfield to take the place of Pizarro, and the foresight proved so accurate that I really wish I had the written document to prove it... oh but wait, I do!

The most urgent requirements are two players for the bench who can substitute, when needed, David Pizarro and John Arne Riise – in other words, a playmaker and left-back. Both these players have had a fantastic year and they’ll be starters again after the summer, but there is no-one to replace them in case of injury or even just fatigue. Roma Club Focus, 09/04/2010.

But management does nothing, because management philosophy says: GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT. In other words, if something works good, it's going to stay good. This is so dumb I actually feel my IQ jolting just by typing it. We'll discuss the issue of a regista later, but honestly, how the fuck can you expect Riise to keep playing like a locomotive piloted by Steven Seagall as he did the entire last year and never need to sit back, or, MAYBE, get injured?

Then the season starts and, suprise surprise, our reptilian-faced Norwegian bangs his head against a lamp or something and he's down, to the anguish of all the iguanas who support Roma, and who do we substitute him with? Mary Poppins? Jacques Costeau? Anatole France? Oh wait - Marco Cassetti.

Marco Cassetti will remain to me one of those odd, grotesque puzzles which make less and less sense the more you get away from it with age. Some time ago he used to wear his hair and moustache like Adolf Hitler, and people thought my reaction to him was aesthetic. Not at all. It's the way he plays that gets to me. He is not useful in the offence. He is not much good in the defence. He is never seen in the midfield. When everybody else is performing the offside trap, he stands there like a mongoloid, looking around himself with a tragic look of disorientation in his eyes, like a child in one of those Lassie episodes where the kid gets lost by the river and has to hang weeping on to the tree-trunk till the hyperactive collie comes yapping about in the break between yapping to four adolescents taking ecstasy and yapping to a T-Rex that got lost in Greenwood National Park or wherever. I sometimes wonder if Cassetti could walk through the wardrobe of Narnia and enter into the other world and hold a different type of expression on his face for a change. I mean, I've had my issues with Perrotta, but at least that was localised - Perrotta was great at doing everything, but absolutely terrible at shooting. Cassetti is just terrible at everything. It was particularly painful to hear that he was being employed on the left. Why on earth he's still not just in the team but a fucking starter is to me utterly mysterious.

Presumably the reason is that as well as holding to the principles of FOLLOW THE GLITZ and GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT, management are so full of illuminati that they also follow this little pearl of Tibetan wisdom, OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW. Another retarded assumption. Yay.

Marco Motta did not deserve his spot after his performances started resembling those of a toilet-seat which grew legs and started playing, but I honestly believe that Aleandro Rosi is better than Cassetti, by an arm's length and more. The fact that he's gonna get better with time while Cassetti is going to get worse is another point in his favour. And this reminds me - whatever happened to that young fella, taken from Inter, super-promising young central defender, yes? A certain Andreolli? He was sent away on loan, he had serious injury trouble, which were solved with all due patience, and last year he came back to Roma. AND HE BARELY EVER PLAYED. From what I saw, he really looked intriguing. He was thrown away. I say give him a starter's shirt this year. Yeah, and I'm not even drunk. Give him a starter's shirt over Juan or Mexes or Burdisso (fine start to the season by this last dickhead, by the way). It's a risk, of course it is, but how do you think young players are made? By throwing vitamins against their heads? No, by PATIENCE and by giving them responsibility and by taking risks. You HAVE to, sometimes. This guy wasn't a total stranger, we'd seen him play, he'd shown he had promise. Play him. Yeah, he'll make a few mistakes. He'll allow a few goals. So what. The adult defenders conceded a few stupid goals as well (a certain Juan this Sunday against Sampdoria could have been Ben Stiller, or even Fantozzi). Besides, consider again the youth factor. As time passes, the number of goals he costs you can only go down (if things go according to plan, drastically down). Those of older players will stay the same at best or start going up as they age.

But why put faith in him, right? I mean, remember the tenet, FOLLOW THE GLITZ. And if you've got to buy a new central defender, stick with OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW, so that someone like Burdisso will always be preferable to, say, Cagliari's Davide Astori, who was young, accessible and excellent.

I'm not discussing fantasy football here. I'm speaking seriously. The guy deserved to be used, even in a position as delicate as that of the centre-back. A team that starts the same crap right-back that it did five years ago and throws away the likes of Rosi, Motta, Curci, Antunes and Andreolli in the process is a team where something is seriously wrong. And the 'wrong' starts up there at the level of management.

Coming up tomorrow: The midfield. Exclamation mark!!

Rant Roma Regarding - Prolegomenon

One of the reasons I stopped writing about football was that I'd started working as a sailor on a cruise ship. Considering I worked ten or eleven hours a day, there was little space left to watch the sport, and even less to write about it. Another reason though, or at least the thing which made the pill a little less bitter to swallow, was the fact that I knew we Italy and Roma fans were going to get our arses steamrolled like the highways of Japan in the near future, and I didn't really feel like watching it.

I'll pass on how the World Cup went for the benefit of my over-90 readership who may suffer from a stroke at the mere mention of it, but I'm thinking of this fat pianist who worked on my ship and thought he 'knew a thing or two' about football. When an Italian tells you that he 'knows a thing or two' about football what he means is that you can hear his opinion and die, so I knew I was in for some monologues. So Yoda here is sipping his Scotch at the crew bar and he tells me, with this air of casual solemnity, 'way I see it, Roma are going far this year. I see them in some serious good shape.' My response was that, way I saw it, we weren't going far enough to pick our own noses. The team suffered from some serious structural limitations and the real problem was the whole managerial philosophy behind them, which exacerbated rather than addressed the cracks in the red and yellow dam.

The guy chuckled. (Fat people are particularly exasperating when they chuckle at you). Me, I didn't say anything. But I bet him a beer for Roma's results against his. A few months later, I had so many beers on credit at that bar that I could have got half of deck 4 as drunk as a bunch of salamanders. 'I don't get it,' Yoda said, shelling out the cash, 'they had such a solid team. They improved so much. Whatever went wrong?'

Yes, whatever did go wrong? I'm going to spend the next few posts explaining why. I guess it's just for the satisfaction of getting to write about football again.

And then there's the fact of pointing out something that I never tire of pointing out. Whenever something doesn't work in a team, you get these football rednecks who start yelling like someone stole their frisbees and pointing their fingers at one particular problem. Like, Claudio Ranieri's the problem! Or, our weak attack is the problem! Or, the new plutonium toothpaste in Coverciano is the problem! Or, the fact that Marco Cassetti has been tied to a dead elephant for the last twenty years is the problem, and the fact that we've purchased another dead elephant (Adriano) on the mercato is also the problem!

No. When you lose one match, maybe there is one problem (which is why one single problem is enough to screw up an entire World Cup campaign, see Dunga's Brazil and the most rigid 4-2-3-1 in history, but anyway). When a whole half-season is going pear-shaped, then THERE'S ALMOST NEVER just one problem, it is always a COMBINATION of problems. A single problem can be solved quickly. A combination of problems perpetuate each other and require ages to be disentangled (see Spalletti's trouble in getting the old Roma back on their feet, and the time it took Ranieri to restabilise it).

At the heart of it, these problems are caused by a deeply flawed football philosophy entertained at the levels of management, one which leads to choices which, on the long run, really hurt the team. Why do I say this? Let's break it down, and let's go see exactly where the problems lie - or, more accurately, how the exact same problems re-present themselves for all departments of the team, leading to a single unified brain meltdown.

Coming up tomorrow: Part 1, The Defence.

Dom Grego

When people asked me about my impressions of D---, after the first few months I'd spent working there, my answer was always - the backstage is the more interesting bit. Two years later, I stand by that statement. The 'magical' face of D---, the facade, as it were, appears to me as a succession of small and predictable set pieces, with little or no emotional transport for an adult. But the backstage, where all the grit and energy are thrown into the dynamo, where the individual inclination clashes against the professional demands, that's something special.

My favourite spot was the 'Monster' breakroom, that is to say, the spot reserved for the breaks inbetween sets held next to Park II's 'M--- & Co.' zone. There's a long stretch of concrete inbetween a restaurant and the Cinemagique which leads to an open ground, a sort of connecting space between that part of the park and its entrance. There, strategically, a prefabricated breakroom made of glass and plastic, little more than a cagey rectangle, stands behind some vases of plants. I remember that place because my most frequently assigned character, big blue monster S---, rested there next to the smaller ones working at the entrance. There weren't many of us who played S---. The guy was so big and heavy, the head wasn't even a helmet, it was a backpack wrapped around your waist and shoulders and dangling in front of you, with the rest of the matted costume ponderously hanging from it, and the arms a pair of plastic extensions (a few, the old ones, were even made of metal). The 'feet' were enormous and the sweat you produced inside that blue fur-sack was beyond belief. You had to be 187 cm at least to play him.

Most people in that height range tried to avoid the guy, so the task fell on the few regulars who never protested. There were perhaps four of us. I actually rather liked old S---, if only because the shift on the whole was quite clement once you got the morning out of the way. The others not so much, though some of them never complained. And among the ones who never complained, there was a guy called Dominique, or Dom Grego.

Dom Grego was a big guy. He was taller than I was, which wasn't common in that place, but unlike some of my other substitutes, he was bulky as well, with meaty arms and a thick, round thorax. His skin was soft and shiny, like that of a sea-mammal. His hands perhaps betrayed him, thicker, more worn than the rest of his body, full of lines like the map of a city planned a hundred years ago and never built according to project. I got to see a lot of his skin because whenever any of us came back into that breakroom and shrugged off the artificial furs from our body, the first thing we'd do would be to throw the t-shirt into the bag (there was a black bag in a bin for used linen; we'd change t-shirts at every set). In the summer, when the air was so dry it was almost better to stay inside, we'd sit wheezing on the sofas for a few minutes in our underwear, oblivious to the fates of the little 150 cm characters who scuttled around us to get outside like Wookies, watching our counterpart as he donned his own version of the big blue bastard. Many times he saw me wheezing, my forehead pearled with sweat, and many times I saw him, gasping for breath as the mask fell over my line of sight.

I never spoke much with Dom Grego - I never spoke much with anybody but my closest friends, truth be told - but there's some reasons he sticks out in my memory. He was sweet, for one thing. He always had a smile on his face. He never complained, or never seemed to do so seriously, which was a rarity in there. He had soft, child-like eyes (something I never had twenty years ago). I said I didn't speak with him much, but when I did, it was always for a laugh.

When Fred told me a few days ago that he was decesead as a result of an epilectic crisis, the thing that came to mind was this - that in all my memories with him, we were laughing together. Not a single moment that I remember with him was sad. I'm not the best person to write a memorial for this infinitely gentle giant, not by a long shot - when I checked, his remembrance facebook group counted more than 650 contacts (and growing), and I don't think I'm among the half who knew him best - but one thing that struck me was that, whoever little I may have known him, I knew only happiness for what he brought to the people around him, and all I know to be taken away from the world, now he's left it, is this happiness. Or, to put it in terms which all who knew him will be more familiar with, his smile. That lovely big smile.

It comes to me, as I sit here in my studio, two years and a thousand kilometres from that breakroom, that I am probably the only one, barring perhaps those few other regulars, who will remember him for those particular afternoons as S---. And if that part of him only lives in my memory, it follows that that part of me only lived in his. It means that, in a sense, a little part of me died with him, too. It was the part of time that I shared with him. As I look at the hundreds of faces on his facebook memorial who joined to pay him tribute, I can only marvel at the richness of life and experience he shared with others, and I can only gape at how much of the world just died when Dom Grego was not in it anymore.

I wish to tender a little memorial here, perhaps because I have nothing else, perhaps because I cannot send over flowers or share some words with the friends he has left, perhaps because nobody else would really care that I cared. And for what it's worth, I do care. Rest in peace, Dom Grego, and thanks for your kindness. Thanks for being the one who smiled. Thanks for being my back to back. Thanks for helping me put that Genie costume on, with those impossible shoulder-pads. Thanks for not being afraid of my silence. Thanks for never complaining. Thanks for the little things. Thanks for everything. A thousand times thank you, from all of us. Now. Forever.

Remembering Saint Petersburg

I was sitting in a bar off Nevsky Prospect - the Tower Pub, it was called - and I had my usual armament spread out before me: a porcelain tea-kettle, the cup, a packet of cigarettes tossed by the crimson tissues, the Tower Bridge box of matchsticks which I called my luck, and the blue Wordsworth Classics paperback of Crime and Punishment. I'd reckoned that now that I was in Russia was as good a time as any to catch up with my Dostoevsky, and I'd been taking it to the bar to kill my long daylight hours, alongside the poetry books I was meant to review for Jon.

Holidays as I like to enjoy them are more about the night-life than they are about the day, or, for that matter, the place. I saw very little of St Petersburg in terms of art and culture in my second visit (not that the city is lacking). I did flesh out the more transient world of discos and clubs, and that with a certain assiduity. By day, though, when no-one is about and you can't really do much without also spending much, the only thing to do is to find a pub, sit there with literature and some vice (alcohol, fantasies, cigarettes, sweets or an old sorrow), and let the mind go until it forgets about time. Eventually, you also forget that you are there to forget about time. And then you put the mobile phone on the table and send random texts to people you know. Their answers are shaken out into your blue digital window over the breadth of an hour or two or three - it makes no difference, by that stage you do not remember - and when the night folds over the city, you usually have a place to go.

I made it my policy not to socialise too much with the staff. I really needed a place where I could feel welcome any time I went, and I've found that often the best way to ensure a consistent good disposition from other people is to keep your mouth shut. Besides, I didn't want to look like I came there to look for friends. The only time I made some contact with others in there, barring the times when the sun was down, I was approached by someone else. There was a cul-de-sac at the end of the pub with some tables, where I usually sat on the padded benches against the wall, my things resting on the wood in front of me. There was the best light in that corner, and I'd been meditating there for the early afternoon. Somewhere further down my right, a bulky, curly-haired figure of considerable height and weight, dressed entirely in black, sipped a beer at the languid rate of a bradypeptic. Every two or three sips he'd light himself a cigarette, held like a sword of chalk on his clothes full of night.

'That's one of the most amazing books I've ever read,' he said to me, at one point when I was lost in my thought. He spoke in perfect English, with this skirled, slightly nasal voice. His finger was pointing to my Dostoevsky. I smiled at him, looking for a discussion of any type but the literary, and quickly changed the subject. Our exchange was tentative and broken - neither of us were over-eager for a conversation, but we did not disdain the distraction. I reasoned to myself that I had several turns of the clock to go and that it wouldn't hurt to spend a half-hour now in chat with this local. We spoke vaguely about our jobs and backgrounds, he said his name was Kyle, if I remember correctly, and he was Canadian. He'd come here to Russia for business (what else? But then I know what else), and he'd worked on a ship too, in some remote past when he had no money.

'Some time ago I was coming out of the metro,' he told me, 'and I was addressed by this beggar. A bum. And I said something to him in German and he replied, also in German. I was pretty riddled to find a bum in St Petersburg who could express himself in a good German language, with no accent and all, so I asked him, howcome you speak German? And he told me, I've been here since the war. There was snow and everything. He tells me this, he tells me, I've been here since the war, and I couldn't come back, and I've been in slave labour camps and all.' He said everything in pretty much a monotone voice. We'd both lit cigarettes as he was talking. 'And after that I came here to St Petersburg, and I had no papers and all, and I was stuck. There was nothing for me here, and even if I could go back now, there would be nothing for me home. And I told him, you poor bastard. I told him, you poor bastard. This was one guy who had been through some shit.'

There was a tone of genuine compassion in his voice, not at all marred by the note of humour which rang through it (it was the enjoyment of telling a good story). When his phone trilled he answered in Russian. 'Priviet, Vassily,' he said, and stood to pace about the lounge. It was a short while later that he left, leaving me his card. It had been a pleasant chat.

I returned to my Dostoevsky, ordering a fruit beer to go with. I walked out a few hours later and I reflected with no jealousy on how ordinary, even how easy it is to find tragedy in Russia. Maybe this characterises the country more than the cold and the snotty skies. Or maybe the two things are linked in mysterious ways.

I started crushing a line of snow as I headed for the hostel, my hands curled into fists into gloves into pockets, my forehead low under the fuzzy hood. Another time, I would have cherished the opportunity. I would have called it gratifying to have the chance to let him live on a little - I'd have been under the deterministic impression which tells a budding story-teller that stories redeem, that morality has a voice, that responsibility is fulfilled by words. I guess the bum's best hope is not to be under the same delusion.

History played around with him a little, and now the only enemies which deign him with attention are the parasites of myth. (That, and the cold, of course). If he knew that I'm telling his story, or that I have the power to lift it from the snow of memory, I'm sure he'd still get it backwards. His story is an invisible house of cards, which only makes sense because it is untold. Even if I could give him immortality, I wouldn't have the heart.

Post-script. The Tower Pub has a site. Ella disliked the place, disdaining it as 'boring,' though I suspect her disinterest was cultural in its origin. Those who wish to see the setting for this story can find out a little here: http://pub-tower.ru/

Death of the Rant Machine

I promised I'd update at least one more time, and here I am. I find myself in the port of Amsterdam at the moment, on a ship which has just arrived here from Copenhagen. We do not have many breaks but there is time enough for a quick note before dinner.

My good readers, my beloved friends, I do no longer have the time to keep and update a blog. I do not even have enough to expose myself to the popular culture which frequently becomes the topic of my writings. I have little free time, and that which I have, I spend it all in my cabin, reading the books that I have taken with me, or going to see me girlfriend in her own cabin (yeah, I'm in a relationship with one of the waitresses on board, a Brazilian who is a true girl of iron).

So this leaves little time for the Rant Machine. To all those who are reading me and have read me, thank you for your time and attention. It was nice to have a blog and it has been useful and gratifying in more ways than one, so I'm sorry that I cannot keep it up.

I belong to the sea now. Until next time we meet on dry land, and until an improbable (who knows) resurrection of the Rant Machine, farewell, and stand me now and ever in good stead.

Yours,
John Silver, a.k.a. Andrea Tallarita.

Showing it by the style

O Brother. I'm tired. I just spent the entirety of a night writing an essay for a poetry magazine and it turned out to be 2700 words. I might try and slim it down tomorrow. I can't believe people in academia still whine about having to write a 5000 words essay every four weeks or so, what do you do with all your free time, construct cathedrals?

So this may be the chronicle of the 'aborted ideas for blog-posts' in the head of Andrea Tallarita, where there's enough space for a couple of dancing soirees anyways. Firstly, I intended to write a nice post about Blood Meridian. That's a novel about some guy you might have heard of, you know, William Shakespeare? Hello?? No wait it's Cormac Mc Carthy actually - what the fuck have I been reading all the time? Did that lady at the bookshop screw me up, like when I asked her for an edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without the philosophical bits?

It would have made for a nice good book review or something, and though this may have twisted the panties of all those who saw their nuts falling onto the floor-tiles with tedium after I ejaculated my mumblings about Ulysses (incidentally that didn't feel like ejaculating at all, I've had better orgasms when my adolescential wet-dreams still failed to distinguish between hot and tumescent and they got me in bed with my math teacher, who was a fat reef of such proportions that when she sat in the sea, mussels started building homes on her ass), though it may have caused pain, I was saying, it would nonetheless have been a safe bet.

Unfortunately this possibility was taken away from me. For one thing, the novel is the most violent thing I've ever read in my life and it made as morose and depressed as Sid Vicious. You're basically following this kid who runs from his house and within the first chapter he's jamming a broken bottle into the eye of a guy whose ears have been ripped off. You'd think that would be the climax, but it's only the climax to the extent that being found out downloading porn on the week before your grandparents catch you humping your stuffed dolphin while wearing a scuba mask and fins can be called a climax. I mean, you'd think this is a joke or something, but the book goes so far as to have a slaughtering of puppies! Goddammit, what the fuck did McCarthy's parents show him before bedtime, videos of Abu Ghraib?? But it must also be said that the novel is gorgeously, gorgeously beautiful, not to mention intelligently clever, remarkably notable and unbelievably incredibly, and a really sophisticated historical novel. Arguably one of the best American novels of the 20th Century, and I didn't feel like I could do it justice in a quick blog post. (Of course I could write another epic as I did for Joyce.... the fuck I will! I'd rather cock-fence with the snout of a sawfish than do that again!).

So onto more banal subject matters, I went to the cinema today to see Robin Hood. Not bad, but this is the last time I'm buying popcorn and pepsi at the movies. Seriously, for what fucking reason do they serve the Pepsi in double-pint size glasses?? What do they assume I am, an elephant? I wasn't halfway through the glass when my bladder started sending acute alarm bells and I had to jog out of there for the toilet. This wouldn't have been a problem per se, but in a cinema which could have accommodated 250 people no sweat, we had all for some reason decided to sit on exactly the same line. As a consequence, in a surreal atmosphere like something out of the vacuum scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I stepped over the knees of eight different swearing couples to walk outside. And then, back. At which stage my father had to go of course, because he doesn't exactly have a bladder as a dragon-heart, and I sat there waiting in the vague fear that he may get lost and I'd have to go and look for him.

I could have written a proper blog entry at least on Robin Hood, but this was made impossible by my level of fatigue. I'm so tired, dude. I think it shows by the style. Then again, everything about me shows by the style.

Twenty-five

It’s ten minutes to midnight on the 4th of May as I write this, and tonight is my birthday. Twenty-five, kiddos. There’s a lot of yack I could put down about my feelings on this day and all that, but I find this kind of talk works much better when I’m getting drunk, so I’ll leave it aside for next time I meet you. Because if you’re reading this, then the odds are, we’re going to meet, or meet again. I’m like a bad penny, you know.

I’d like to discuss a couple of things that have been going on in my life, something which I normally don’t do on this blog if not in humorous terms, because they’re relevant to this page. For a long time I have wished to work on the sea. Not necessarily as a career for life, but at least for a few years, I wanted to become acquainted – personally – with that entity by the side of which I have grown up. It is true that I spent most of my early life in Rome; but it’s also true that my grandmother used to live in the countryside by the sea, and since we’d go to her place almost every summer, my childhood was spent in touch with the Mediterranean. When I grew up and came back from Spain, the score did not change. I used to spend my summers at my grandmothers, an exile which allowed me to spend all my time reading and writing. Again, the sea was always by me, be it in the early-morning walks after a night spent writing, or breaking on the rocks where I’d sit with a copy of some obscenely hard and boring book, battered by sunlight and obstinacy.

Though it took a while before I could put my aspiration into practice, when coming back from the glitz of Paris I decided it was time to give it a shot. I gave myself the time for the journey through India, which had the effect (among others) of utterly draining my finances. Then I started looking for jobs at sea. It was an incredibly frustrating task and I went through several ordeals which I really have no patience to recount, but finally, and mainly by luck, I was offered a place as steward on a cruise-ship (I look so snazzy in those suits it’s something you would not believe).

I have no idea what the hell this is, it looks like a Julia set with marine colours (a notion I find really, really beautiful).

I am saying all this because working on the ocean, all sources agree, is hugely taxing, especially on a cruise ship. It does pay very well, but it leaves little time for much else. I am giving up my football journalism for it; hell, I won’t even be able to see the matches of the upcoming World Cup. My cooking is going down the drain as well. I will cut down on all of my writing but the poetry, which I do not intend to give up. There will be no articles for any sites, no opinion forums, sparse letters to my friends. And there’s good chances that I’ll have to shut down this blog as well.

I’m hoping that this is not the case; and I reserve judgment for when I actually get on the ship, that is to say, the 17th of May. I embark in Portugal. I have a plane to Lisbon in just about two weeks from now, and from there, we sail across the seas of Northern Europe: North Germany, Denmark, Scotland, Iceland, and all of Scandinavia (a personal dream of mine). Then the second season will take me to South America, assuming of course that I’ve survived the trial period of the first two months.

Once I do embark, I promise to post at least once more. I will see how life is like on the crest of the spume, and I’ll find out whether it allows me to keep posting on this page, for the which I have developed no small measure of affection. If I can, then I shall continue posting from the surface of the waves. If I cannot, then I shall put up a farewell post, and it will be time to shut down the blog.

In the meantime, I hope you are all well. I am enjoying these last days of vacation, and I am looking up at the stars a lot. Astronomy is one of the few things I will not have to give up once I’m on the sea. If anything, I should see clearer skies than anywhere else in the world.