Der Himmel über Berlin

So you want seven random facts about me, eh? Ok, here goes.

- When I was born, a cousin of my dad's really really wanted to call me Emanuel. Got lucky, they decided on Stephen instead.

- My year and a half in Berlin is the longest I have ever stayed put in one place since I left home aged 17.

- My two biggest fears are cucumbers and cotton wool.

- I have an odd mole on the back of my neck that I feel would be invaluable in identifying my body should I ever be decapitated.

- The first Star Wars film that I ever saw was Episode 2, and I thought everyone in the world was crazy to be so obsessed about such shit. But then I watched the three originals, and was converted. Well, I thought Return of the Jedi was pretty silly, but Empire Strikes Back is so good that it makes up for just about everything.

- Embarassingly, my sister, who is about half my size, fractured my wrist when we were kids by kicking a ball at me. As I goalkeeper, I felt obliged to make a flying save, which resulted in my right wrist bending back much further than anatomically allowed. It was a magnificent save though.

- When I was a baby, a wasp got into my nappy and stung me on the ass. I cried and cried.

I really need to get out of Europe. I have only seen 7% of the world!

create your own visited countries map

One of the main reasons why I moved to Genoa three years ago was to follow my football team, Sampdoria. Yes, yes, Irishman supporting mediocre Italian team, unusual I know. So of course, despite the pretence purpose of this holiday being to have a romantic weekend away with the missus, it just happened to coincide with Samp's last home game of the season.

However it was nearly a disaster. Due to the recent hooliganism problems in Italian football, the regulations have been completely revamped, meaning that you can't buy tickets at the stadium before the match like you could before. Not being aware of this, we had a frantic taxi journey across the city to get to the one place that was allowed to sell tickets on the matchday afternoon, just making it on time. Which was lucky,as I would have broken down and cried like a little baby if we hadn't.

Unfortunately though, the match was dreadful, Samp scraping a 1-0 victory with a desperately lucky goal. Things had changed a lot from the matchdays that I remember. A lot of the atmosphere is gone; presumably Italians can't be bothered with all the pre-purchashing business or the necessity of a passport for the purchase of a ticket. A few fans on our side of the stadium tried to get a few chants going, but there just weren't enough people and certainly not enough passion, which was sadly reflected on the pitch with the utterly lethargic performance.

We shook off the hefty remains of a cocktail-induced hangover to head to the shockingly beautiful but disgustingly touristy CinnqueTerre. A couple of minutes into the trek, the missus began to regret her high-heeled boots and jeans, especially since the sun was belting down a sweaty thirty degrees on our pale, sun-deprived skin.

So in we popped to a well-placed clothes shop in the second village, staffed by two elderly Italians who probably couldn't believe their luck that there were so many idiotic tourists around, willing to buy just about anything that had CinqueTerre written on it. As I waited for her to try on the shockingly overpriced but totally necessary shorts, there was a constant stream of people coming in, shouting at the poor old people in English, of which they didn't have a word. I got a pretty big kick out of translating for all of them, and one thicko in particular gave me an interesting idea. She jokingly asked me if I could come on the rest of her holiday with her (lucky for my girl she wasn't hot, so the 'no' came out immediately).

But what about it? What about Rent-a-Holiday-Friend? I'm sure there are plently of people who wouldn't mind paying a nice, friendly, witty, charming, intelligent, handsome Italian-speaking Irishman to accompany them on their holiday, on the condition that they don't have to deal with any language barriers. Everybody wins - they don't have to shout loudly at people, I get to speak lots of Italian, the Italians don't get bothered (as much) by loud, ignorant tourists; and I get a paycheck at the end.

So, who wants me? I'm pretty cheap. And I'm good. I'll make your holiday special. Provided you have the Euro notes at the ready.

As a complete Italophile, two years is a long time to be absent from the country where my heart belongs. It's also a long time to live in Germany, where Italian food and language and culture are about as welcome as a wurst that doesn't taste like ground-up stray dog.

Last weekend, I went back to Genoa, where I lived for a year about three years ago. I was extradorinarily nervous beforehand, believing that my Italian had got lost in a horrible mash of disgusting German grammar, and was afraid that I wouldn't be able to show off to the missus how wonderful my Italian was, especially since I had been using my superb Italian as an excuse not to bother my ass learning proper German.

Landing back in Italy was marvellous. I love the place so truly and inexplicably - in a way it felt like the love you can feel for a person; that you just feel at home in their company and you feel that whatever you say or do around them somehow fits perfectly, even if at first you rustily sound like someone who just learned a couple of phrases out of an Italian phrasebook.

We had wonderful trouble finding somewhere to eat in Milan before our train to Genoa - since we had got up at 3a.m., 11a.m. was dinnertime even though every eating possibility was still closed. Eventually I managed to convince a wizened old restaurant owner to let us hang out in his place drinking beer and coffee until he felt like serving us a few hours later. Shortly afterwards, the place was gatecrashed by an huge crowd of elderly Germans, which pretty much ruined the whole thing. But we had a couple of minutes of wonderful Italian tranquility.

That is, as much tranquility as you can have with every person in sight shouting into a mobile phone. But, like I said, it was Italian tranquility.

From the very first moment, I knew that there was something special between us. Through a crowd I spotted a flash of radiant blue and I knew that we would be together forever. As a deeply rational person, this was highly irregular, but I couldn't stop myself. Everything was just right. We belonged together, right from that very first moment.

The times we shared seemed like they would never end. Just the two of us, the world flying by, oblivious to our connection, our souls linked together, binding us magically as though we were one.

We could have ruled the world, the two of us, there was nothing we couldn't have done. We had so many plans. So many things we wanted to do together. Our future was flowing out before us.

And then it was cruelly snatched away.

Because, last Thursday, my beautiful bike, Paolo, was stolen.

I went to see Spider-Man 3 last night. I love utterly stupid, action-filled films, so I was a little disconcerted about not liking it at all. I mean, it has lots of webbing and jumping and punching and everything that should make it great, and this is before I even mention the enormous sand-monster that flips cars everywhere and bashes things up. Should be great, shouldn't it?

But no. When a films wants to be a big crush festival of spinny fast exciting things, I absolutely demand that it doesn't attempt to treat of anything vaguely close to human actions or feelings or emotions. And I certainly demand that if it really insists on trying, that it must not, absolutely must not, use the exchange of heirlooms such as rings or lockets or both to represent the emotional turmoil that the character who is clutching said heirloom is going through. Surely, surely there is a more subtle and original way than this?

I also don't want it to be totally predictable, and then I don't want every single character to be crying at the end. I mean, I have just watched an enormous battle between a man-spider hybrid, a sandmonster, a dude posessed by an alien and a guy on a flying skateboard. Why would anyone be crying after that? The good guys won! We saw stuff get smashed and crashed and bashed! Let's go drink beer and shout and stuff, not cry and whimper and clutch our heirlooms!

Plus the hyphen really annoys me. It shouldn't be there. It's Spiderman. Or Spider man. Nouns should only be hyphenated to prevent confusion, like here: Icelandic donkey-eater. There we know that he's an Icelandic man who eats donkeys, not a man who only eats Icelandic donkeys. But with Spiderman, there's no such confusion. Give us back our damn hyphen!