Grumpy Oldie Man
I had one task – remember where I parked the hire car – and I blew it
The guy, I told my son Louis and his friend Ben last night as an unusually long and challenging day drew to its close, is obviously bananas.
The venue was a piazza in Catania, where we arrived yesterday for a threeday autumn break/fact-finding mission. Louis is writing a novel set in Sicily, and could use some local colour.
The guy was the colourful local who approached as I parked the hire car, flapping his arms and frantically addressing us in a language none of us speaks.
‘What’s he trying to tell us?’ croaked Ben with deeper fatigue than the 4am start and vicissitudes of cattle-class air travel could explain.
After 30 minutes in a crocodile queue for security at London Luton Airport – as it thoughtfully designates itself in case anyone’s at risk of checking in at Ulaanbaatar Luton Airport in error – you long for the abattoir.
But there are worse trials than that, and, until a few hours ago, I intended to write about the unrivalled misery, in the age of techno-enslavement, of losing a smartphone. Then I lost a car. This had less to do with its size – small enough to slip through a pocket-hole though a Fiat 500 happens to be – than my inexplicable failure to record where I’d parked it.
The first hour of the search was marked by the saintly tolerance of young men obliged, through no fault of theirs, to traipse the streets of a hot and humid alien city with a galaxy-class imbecile.
For while searching a Sicilian street once for a missing Fiat must be considered common sense, searching a street for a sixth, seventh and, in one instance, 11th time seems an overly zealous attempt to prove Einstein’s theory of insanity.
The second hour proved harder on us all than the first; though, with hindsight, easier than the third. ‘Not to be negative,’ muttered one of them, ‘but this is the 12th time we’ve walked past that scooter outside that chemist.’
Traditionally, Louis enjoys the fiasci – running out of petrol or oil, or, one time, both; driving for two hours the wrong way along the M4; ending up in a French town with the same name as our destination, but 150 miles to its east – that invariably accompany our travels.
When once at Stansted I was detained and cross-examined by a ‘behaviour detection officer’ for not knowing the precise value of the three currencies in my pocket, Louis was in ecstasy at the prospect of handcuffs.
Experience has taught him to anticipate chaos, and he had clearly briefed Ben to expect the same. But when the second hour concluded with the chemist’n’scooter combo for the 15th time, neither seemed eager for the third.
A few minutes shy of entering the fourth, Ben yelped, ‘That’s it – that’s an aubergine Fiat!’
‘Yup, yup,’ muttered Louis. ‘And there’s a dog lead in the front. So far as I recall, we didn’t bring a dog.’
As I slumped to my knees, hands clasped and raised like a mourner at the cross in a Renaissance triptych, one of them screamed, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ and pointed two spaces down the road.
There it was, the aubergine Fiat, smugly indifferent to the mayhem. Hugging and dancing in circles, we made such inchoately hysterical noises that it wasn’t evident to us, let alone to the growing posse of bemused observers, whether we were weeping or laughing.
‘Why on earth didn’t I make a note of the street name?’ I mused a little later.
‘That’s not one for me,’ replied Louis. ‘That’s one for a squad of crack psychoanalysts, split into three teams, and working eight shifts round the clock.’
Small wonder, then, that he raised a sardonic eyebrow when I called the arm-flapper ‘bananas’.
‘I accept that it takes one to know one,’ he said, ‘but could he be warning us not to park here?’
Lightning, I reassured him, doesn’t strike twice. Not on the same day in the same town in the same vehicular context. He shrugged. After yesterday’s exertions, he sounded forgivably groggy at 7.30 this morning when I used the replacement iphone to call from the piazza.
‘I don’t know how to break this to you…’ I began. ‘…but you’ve lost it again,’ he finished. The square, it transpires, hosts a daily market. The Fiat had evidently been towed away.
‘I’m not sure what to do next,’ I said. ‘I could descend into Dante’s missing tenth circle of hell by trying to find someone at the police station who speaks English. But as you may have gathered, I’m not especially brilliant at finding things, and that could take several years.
‘Or we could ask a taxi driver to take us to the nearest Mafia village, shout whatever the Italian might be for “We are tax inspectors” through a megaphone, and get ourselves whacked.’ ‘I’ll wake Ben,’ murmured my son. ‘Ben,’ he eventually reported back, ‘and I’m with him on this, says Mafia village.’