Valentine graffiti

Mild, damp and misty this February 14th.

I hate graffiti. It intimidates me. In underpasses, on abandoned factories and houses, in railway yards, in impossible spots. Graffiti artists mark out their territory in places a woman alone perhaps shouldn't be. Perhaps will regret being. Perhaps goes there anyway. 

This place is other. This is not-you. This is us. We are brutal, virile, dangerous. We oppose you. This is our war-paint. Enter at your own risk.

In London, that is.

In Cannobio, jewel of Lago Maggiore, the graffiti on the underpass walls tell a different story.

A love story. A love story all hearts and flowers, and ti amo 4 ever. A love story full of adolescent insecurity, longing and bravado. Strangely, while the anglophone world looks to Italian as the language of passion, these youngsters pepper their pantings with English.

Five minutes away in Switzerland, however, the authorities are one step ahead of the graffiti artists. Here, the public loos in Ascona's lakeside playground are pre-graffitified, not with the stutterings of juveniles but with whimsical poetry in French and Italian. Still, even the Municipio has a heart: the theme, as ever, is l'amour.

Back in Cannobio, another kind of amorous declaration has appeared. The practice of sealing a relationship with a padlock and throwing the key into a river, down a sheer mountainside or into some other unreachable location, has reached us all the way from China, where it was originally used to seal a bargain made with the ineffable. Step out onto Cannobio's Ponte Ballerino, the footbridge that crosses the Cannobino river and connects Cannobio with Traffiume, and one is greeted by lock after lock, many etched with the stock phrases of eternal love in Italian, German and English. All winking in the sunshine. All, we have to assume, unassailable. 

Happy San Valentino, however you choose to express yourself...

And if you're the architect responsible for the Ponte Ballerino, perhaps you might like to rework your sums for the extra weight...how much love can one bridge take?

Is that a heart amid the squiggle?

Amid all the squiggles of daily life,

With him dashing this way, you going that way,

Amid the noise and confusion made

by that beloved rabble you brought into the world,

There, at the centre, still lies a valentine's heart.

Inspired by a squiggle seen on a park bench in Ascona, Switzerland on Valentine's Eve.

To whom it may concern

Today, I don't have the foggiest what the temperature is (if you'll excuse a meteorological pun). The thermometer in the sun and out of the continuing wind, tells me 13 degrees. When I load the washing machine in the pantry (which is basically an outhouse with a septic tank below and a swish granite roof on top) my fingers go numb in 13 seconds flat. So who knows! Bright sunshine. This afternoon, the laghetto (the pond, picture here) is frozen solid.

"Bimbo I love you..."

Door, Centro Storico, Cannobio

PS Happy Birthday to WE, my favourite lurker.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Three of everything

Three degrees at 8:30am. As yesterday : bright sunshine, frost and a cold wind. They say that on St Valentine's day the birds choose a mate. Well, they were certainly making plenty of noise if that's what they were doing this morning.

It being St Valentine's day, I wanted to write something witty, fascinating and erudite on that subject. I started doing a bit of research, and immediately hit a problem. There seem to be at least three completely contradictory accounts of St Valentine's life. In fact, there seem to be at least three St Valentines celebrated on three different days of the year. I'd like to have discovered something of his life's work, but again, I found confusion and contradiction. And the really burning question of why he has come to be associated with lovers, marriage and all things connubial (as well as being patron saint of greetings card manufacturers, bee keepers and travellers) was answered in more than three different ways.

By the time I started reading that St Valentine did nothing remotely romantic and in fact the celebration is an echo of past pagan festivals in which young men drew lots for girls (my sources are curiously silent on the question of 'what then?'), I realised that this project was about three times bigger than I could handle in the three minutes I had before B's gentle humming turned into unfeminine bellows for undivided attention.

So...I thought I might point you towards another article, one that I wrote earlier, also about things coming in threes.