Up jumped spring

Oooooh yace! Spring's here, people! At least it is in Heidelberg and I tell you, it's magical! Down here in the delta, everything's blossoming while the light green of new leaves rushes up the steep hillsides of the previously stark Odenwald. The people are feeling spring's arrival, too, though - there's all kinds of hormones flying around dazzling and confusing everyone, forcing smiles even on the faces of people who thought they had forgotten all about happiness. It's so much fun to watch how people suddenly start wearing colours again, start looking around to see if they're being noticed, how walks become more upright and outward appearance becomes a matter of choice and style, no longer just the fulfillment of necessities. Yes, I am a whole-hearted warm weather afficionado whose dream life involves lots of time spent drinking coffee on busy plazas watching people go by, just spectating. There are many ways in which I would never make a credible Greek/Italian lifer, but like so many Brits and other cold-weather people, its definitely a closet fantasy I harbour. Funny that - that one should be so attracted to an alien lifestyle. Yes, I know that dozens of much better writers than myself have mused the issue before me (I particularly enjoyed Richard Porter's perspective, aired in his evo column of yore). It just still makes me laugh to imagine the stereotypical Armani-turtleneck-and-designer-stubbled Italian nursing a late-evening espresso outside his favourite harbourside bar with starlit skies, laughter and music for a backdrop, musing on how nice it would be to be called Hugh, James or Sheldon and to live in a Georgian terraced house where you would make yourself cups of tea every morning as you looked out at your Rover 216 parked in the morning drizzle. "Ah, to be an insurance rep in Swindon!" is, I'm pretty sure, not something the Giorgios and Stefanes of Brit fantasyland have ever uttered, any more than imagining the thrills of going for a few pints at the Nag's Head on a Saturday. What alien lifestyles, I wonder, do the Italians and other Mediterranean peoples aspire to? "Oh, to be a Massai warrior?" "Oh, the joys of being an Inuit?" Ciao ragazzi for now...