I am sorry I have been silent for some time. I have been in Italy for weeks, doing some research on a fresco by the Italian painter Piero della Francesca, and then I met my granddaughter at Rome. She is an architect and we had a wonderful time discussing monuments, but I wanted to give her a special treat and here it is when fate taught us a lesson.
I took her for lunch at my favourite restaurant and we had a magnificent meal which, alas, refused to behave as meals are wont: next day we both returned to the world what food the restaurant had provided. As you know I am not a believer, and therefore I take the Parable of the Fall (the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise), to mean that life can never be perfect: you do something perfectly innocent such as switching on a light and a miner in Australia, digging for coal for you, dies in an accident.
If you believe in the imperfectability of life, the problem is that you cannot very much complain when things go wrong, So, when I phoned the chef of my restaurant, the first thing I told him was, please, understand that I am not complaining, the meal was magnificent and I will return to your restaurant as soon as I can, but please make sure that you take all necessary precautions to avoid any possible problems with your meals. And we talked for a few minutes, the chef surprised to find me so congenial (he had already been alerted to the disaster by some of my Italian friends) and we ended on the most cordial terms.
You might well think that my relaxed attitude to failure encourages sloppiness. But wait, I shall show you a much more serious example. Some forty years ago I designed and built a holiday house in southern Italy. My builder Giuseppe was wonderful, intelligent and conscientious, but like any builder, he made mistakes, which I only brought gently to his attention if they could be corrected. But there was a problem with some of the sub-contractors that he obviously did not control efficiently.
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