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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'Darrel' CategoryA taxing situationApril 1st, 2007 BY ANDREW DARREL The Italian government has recently adjusted some of its income tax regulations. As a result, according to Corriere della Sera, at one level of income at least, single people now have to pay three times as much income tax as those of their fellow citizens who are married with a couple of kids and a dependent spouse. This strikes me as just a bit unfair. Unlike many of my friends and acquaintances, I have no objection to paying taxes, and probably, Italy being the country it is, I could get away with paying less than I actually do. But I consider them an essential part of civilized life. Though some of what I contribute to the commonwealth gets wasted, most of it is still spent on really useful projects like confining my neighbors’ children during daylight hours to places of education. I can also put up with the idea that I might be subject to a bit of discriminatory taxation, up to a certain point — but to have to pay fully three times as much as a married person is too much.
Posted by: The Editors SpotsMarch 1st, 2007 BY ANDREW DARREL I think I saw myself on the metro the other Sunday morning. I was on my way to work, not fully awake yet, and at the stop after mine an old man got on and sat across from me. He was in his late seventies, I would say, and at a first glance seemed quite smartly dressed, in a greenish tweedy jacket and blue silk tie. Further inspection, however, of the type that you have time for on the metro, showed that everything he had on was covered in stains. They looked like old food stains on clothes that had been washed or dry-cleaned several times since the original accidents, so that the stains themselves had faded away and lost the vividness of the original beetroot or ragù — but they had not disappeared completely.
Posted by: The Editors Twenty-one!November 1st, 2006 BY ANDREW DARREL People talk a lot of nonsense, if you ask me, about the supposed differences between men and women, and one of the principal sources of muddle, as far as I can judge from what I see on morning television, is that too few people understand what a generalization is. “The people in group A are on average taller than the people in group B” is regularly interpreted as meaning that every member of group A is taller than any member of B. Until recently the Italian government was capable of concluding that since men, on the whole, in psychological tests, demonstrate themselves to be more strongly predisposed to use violence than women are, then all Italian men should do military service — unless they know someone who could pull strings to get them out of it — and no women may. I wonder if they need to spend more time teaching statistics in high school.
Posted by: The Editors Degraded acousticsMarch 1st, 2006 BY ANDREW DARREL The composer Wolf, it is said, was always changing apartments. Supposedly he never stayed more than three months in any one place, not until the syphilis began to make itself felt and he had to be locked up. His reasons for moving included all the usual ones: not being able to pay the rent, hating the landlord, hating the There was a time once when I started to worry that I might be behaving too much like Wolf, and that it might be for the same fundamental reason — that I too was bonkers. When I last lived in Rome, in the Eighties, in less than three years I moved flats five times, in a city where many people live in a single flat all their lives. I’ve scratched my head but the only other person I can think of here who has lived in more than two apartments is Anna Maria’s dreadful brother, who isn’t mad maybe but is extremely nasty. I don’t worry about the question now, though. The anxiety passed when I moved on to another country, and found other things to worry about.
Posted by: The Editors Angelus ad virginemDecember 1st, 2004 BY ANDREW DARREL As I grow older I find that what the experience of Christmas has lost in intensity, it has made up for in duration. When I was a little kid, Christmas day was the most exciting day of the year, but the excitement and pleasure only lasted from bedtime on the 24th to bedtime on the 25th. For some reason, the earlier preparatory activities never really stirred me. Nativity plays and singing Christmas carols at school were fun, but not more fun than other things we did at other times of year. Making decorations with my big brother and sister was a bit nerve-racking because of the high standard of workmanship they required, and became something of a chore. I wasn’t allowed responsibility for decorating the tree until I was already in my teens, by which time the activity had lost its capacity to thrill. Only the Day itself was special, and once it was over, it was over. Maybe eating cold turkey and pickled onions in front of the TV on the evenings of the 26th, 27th, and, if we were lucky, the 28th could prolong the excitement a little - but not much.
Posted by: The Editors Italians and TurksSeptember 1st, 2003
I read in one of Rome’s new free newspapers a couple of weeks ago that some survey had found that the Italians are the unhappiest people in Western Europe. The article didn’t specify how the institution that conducted the survey chose to measure unhappiness, or how they got around the difficulty of defining unhappiness consistently for speakers of more than a dozen languages, or whether they had considered how willingness to declare oneself unhappy might vary from country to country. It just made this assertion, and left its readers to glow with secret pride. That Italians assess themselves as especially unhappy shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has paid the least attention to what they say about themselves in their films and novels.
Posted by: The Editors Civil WarJune 1st, 2003 BY ANDREW DARREL In the late Eighties and for much of the Nineties I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia (KSA). Life there was for the most part pleasanter and easier for westerners than we are usually prepared to admit, but it was not entirely without hardships. Two of the books that came my way in that period were Veronica Wedgwood’s The King’s Peace (1955) and The King’s War (1959), her account of the Civil War (the civil war of the 1640s), a period of history that I had passed over fairly rapidly and negligently at school and had not seen anything in to draw me back later.
Posted by: The Editors Author profileDecember 1st, 2002 Andrew Darrel grew up in southern Hampshire and South London. He left the UK in 1978, initially intending to spend only a year or so abroad, making his living temporarily by teaching English as a foreign language. He never really took to teaching but found he enjoyed living abroad, so he never went back home. Twenty-one years later, thanks to the generosity of King Fahad ibn Abdulaziz, he had saved up enough to be able to give up teaching, and indeed to give up full-time work entirely, for a while at least. In those twenty-one years he had worked in different parts of Italy and in Egypt and Saudi Arabia; he had spent a year-and-a-half studying in Portland, Ore., and had stayed for various periods in self-declared tax exile in central Spain. At the beginning of 2000 he returned to Rome, and is still there, working part-time in a high school library and a bookshop, and talking all the time about moving on to somewhere better. His Black Lamb column is called Roman Annals.
Posted by: The Editors
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