Natural beauty is great but I find it can often get pretty dull, and there’s a limit to how many times you can drive round the Abruzzo Apennines and still be awed by the same mountains again and again, even though the things on them like snow, trees, flowers – and even grass – are in constant change.

There’s no chutzpah or dopamine fix involved in watching the grass grow, that’s for sure ( I prefer to think of myself more as the Maserati and Greenwich Village type ), but I suppose you do get the odd wolf or hawk to liven things up a bit at times.

Meeting someone like Marco, here in his shop in the tiny hamlet of Collimento, away up in the middle of nowhere, also adds some zest to these beautiful but repetitive mountain drives.

As he was carefully scooping maize flour into glossy bags ‘for the Roman tourists at this time of year, they come to ski, ‘ Marco told me that his business has its roots in Ethiopia, which I liked as another quirky and incongruous little scoop to round off the day.

I learnt recently that Roosevelt gave ‘Fireside Chats’ on the radio every Sunday evening between 1933 and 1944. I have no intention of boring you to tears with 11 years of idle chitchat, but I quite like that folksy Mom and Pop idea ( ‘couthie’, to use a Scots word ), and I am actually sitting at the fireside here in deepest coldest bleakest Abruzzo, chatting to you – for a few seconds anyway.

Abruzzo is a region in Italy, and Italy is still a generally Catholic country, so it’s difficult not to be aware of the various saints’ days and Christian traditions. Today it’s the turn of St Stephen, whose cruel means of murder reminds me of the ‘not throwing the first stone’ aspect of things.

In Ireland though, December 26 is celebrated as Wren Day, and that looks much cheerier: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/12/27/those-that-went-before-us-kept-it-going-from-generation-to-generation/

Up here in the mountains of Abruzzo, one of the coldest and most isolated regions of Italy, it’s not your dolce vita, spaghetti, sunshine and Maseratis. It’s not sophisticated or sleek, and gorgeous young people don’t laugh and flirt in the vibrant sunlit streets from morning til night. Granny isn’t nattering with her matronly pals and shelling beans in some shady corner, and mamma certainly isn’t gazing lovingly for hours over a simmering sugo in the kitchen.

No, Abruzzo’s none of that glib claptrap at all, and if you have the patience and interest ( and if I do too), I’ll write us little stories about other kinds of Italy.

As the interview progressed, the smooth sycophancy of the AI voice and its continual crooning became irksome. In response to my comments, it generated sentences like ” That’s a great answer, Jo “, ” Jo, that’s awesome ! I’d never thought of that” , ” An experienced educator like you, Jo, would be perfect for this special rôle.”

Also, it was slow to catch onto things, so I started to lose interest in the experience within the first few minutes.

But I was slow too, to understand that it was trying to direct me towards a specific task (critiquing the tone and register of a piece of written English, which must have been what it was recruiting candidates for). Once I obeyed its obsequious but insistent instructions and carried out the task, relations improved, and I found the whole thing quite intriguing.

Meanwhile, here’s something for the patriarchy again – the image that I was presented with when I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the first part of this story. Try it out for yourself with your own writings, and you’ll get a masculine image, default mode even in 2025.