Badia Tower, Marsala, Sicily

If you want a romantic holiday for two, Marsala in Sicily is a beautiful baroque town with plenty to see in and around. We stayed in the Badia Tower (booked through Solo Sicily), a converted folly set in the gardens of an old aristocratic estate. Click here for my poem.

You can't easily get any wine that is not made in Sicily, and that is no problem because Sicilian wines are excellent.

We hired a car, which is necessary, but the Sicilian drivers are the worst I have encountered anywhere (and I have been in taxis in Moscow and Turkey), and driving requires constant vigilance and a willingness to swerve frequently. I do not know how we got through Palermo in rush hour unscathed.

Take care not to get double charged on insurance - better to book car hire insurance at the airport because booking the insurance on-line was not recognised by the car hire firms at the airport, so I paid twice. The booking agency refunded my booking fee but nothing else: if you use a booking agency you never know who your contract is with so it's hard to get anyone to take responsibility when it all goes wrong.

Anyway, you will understand from the above that the collision damage waiver is essential for peace of mind.

Having said that, a wonderful holiday and the locals in Marsala were very friendly.

Recommended in Marsala:
La Sirena Ubriaca - a friendly wine bar in which you can taste many local wines before purchase, or just have a glass of wine and some small but very high quality bar nibbles (a nibble is smaller than a snack). (I don't think their mermaid is as pretty as mine.)
The best restaurant is tucked away - from the main square go towards the eastern gate and turn left down one of the narrow alleys before you get to the gate. I'll post more precise details when I find them.
The bar on the main square is good for a savoury pastry or delicious cake and a beer.

The Quackometer duck sells ear candles

I am not so happy with the little black duck at www.quackometer.net. The quackometer is an experiment to see if it is easy to spot quack medical web sites just from the language they use, however it gave a score of 10 canards (the standard international unit of quackery) to my sister's hypnotherapy web site at www.keyhypnotherapy.co.uk, which seems unfair because she says Clients will always be encouraged to follow the advice of their GP or hospital consultant.

What's more that little duck is advertising ear candles.

The saucy site owner one Andy Lewis says you can contact him via the about page on his web site, but there isn't one. I used the internet time machine at www.archive.org to extract his email address from the Akharshic records.

I've emailed Mr Lewis and await a response.

My old home page reinstated!

A blog is all very well, but my old home page was all right, so I have reinstated it. There is a new link to a bizarre cartoon strip Katastrophe Qat I did in my youth (i.e. before the dawn of time). Go to Qatastrophe Kat's new home page. (Katastrophe Kat is a cat, not some weird drug that makes your teeth go a funny colour.) He tries to clean up with a get-rich-quick scheme.

'I' do not exist

'I', in the sense of my own subjective self, does not exist.

Consider the following definition of 'exist':

A thing exists if there is a way for at least two independent observers to verify it, such that their observations match sufficiently.

Now, whereas 'I' (that is, Dace associated with this blog) exist in a certain sense (for you I am a you or a him), my interior subjective 'I' is not accessible to any of you except me. Therefore 'I' fails the test of existence as defined above.

Therefore, 'I' do not exist.

On seeing Peter Brook's Mahabharata

Classical history is the reverse of the version I was taught at primary school.

My school books suggested that there was a gradual ascent from the stone age to all the gleaming technological advances of modern humanity, whereas in ancient times it was believed that we have descended from a more innocent golden age to the primitive and violent age we now inhabit. In this the Indian, Greek and Roman authors agree.

In between that ancient and mythical golden age and our present demonic age stands the Silver age of heroes: in Homer: Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and in the Mahabharata: Bhishma, Drona and Arjuna.

In the time of heroes people thought differently and acted differently. They meant what they said - a word had power both over the person spoken to and over the person speaking. If a hero vowed to do something he would do his utmost to carry it out even at the cost of his life. A man's word used to be his bond, and to break it would involve unacceptable loss of being. Today promises are cheap and exchangeable often not for fulfilment but for excuses.

They had rules of war, some of which have trickled down to us in lip-service form, such as not killing an unarmed man, and some that have not survived at all, such as not fighting after dark, not fighting during the harvest.

At several points in the great battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas the ancient rules of war are broken. One feels that the great epic stands on the edge between the Silver age and our age to follow, an age in which as a man's word means less, so is his being the less, and as the rules are broken so the world slips into chaos.

Yet at these points Krishna himself intervenes, not to keep the old law but to destroy it. Drona is lied to - the deception appears shocking to those who perpetrate it, as if they stand on the very precipice of the old order in doing the unthinkable. Krishna urges them gently on. Arjuna hesitates to plant the fatal arrow in his mortal enemy Karna, Krishna gently urges him to kill.

Consider then Odysseus - the man of many devices who wins the Trojan war on the very eve of defeat by deception. Does he not also stand at the very twilight of the age of heroes, and use language and trickery to survive? How also could he have escaped from the Cyclops except by the verbal ruse of pretending his name was 'Nobody'?

Now having accepted deception as a way of life we have become thoroughly self-deceived. This is what Socrates tried patiently to show and why he was killed.

To be like Silver Age heroes we have at least to know how to use deceptive words (I mean that all words are deceptive) without being ourselves deceived.

The Mahabharata [1989] [DVD] [1990]