Category: Società

Vinavil, Coccoina, Uhu, were the names of glue during my childhood.

 

Vinavil was the paste to use for our exercises with some piece of wood. In a white and red flask, ready to use.  Difficult to free your fingers from leftovers. Sometimes, we were just playing with it, without pasting anything.

 

Coccoina, in the grey pot, was the companion of primary school, to attach together paper sheets and the first collages.  Who can forget its perfume?

Uhu represented the modernity. A transparent thin torrent of stickyness coming from a yellow tube.  Not very effective, though.

 NB I was so absorbed into reminiscences that I missed my train.  The force of memory ……

…. and will post the photo as soon as (and until when) technology will obey human resolve ….

Here we are …

Yesterday, going out with the dog, we met this little friend. Photo not very clear as he was trying to escape ….. we just got the back part among the leaves.

Since I have got a smartphone I changed my habits during transfer to and from the office.  Before I was thinking, now I do read.  On the phone.

In order to get free books to read I thought to go back to the stories I read many times during my childhood (now out of copyrights) starting from Verne’s Mysterious Island.  This is the exercise that I decided (today) to define olderbooking.  Of course, I read them now in their original language and full version, as was not the case many years ago.  There is a sort of confort-feeling re-descovering the old friends and one understand several things about oneself, as the people and events described in those books certainly played an important influence on values and mindset.

Should I have read different boooks, would now I be a different person?  I do think so.  Reading is an important part of personality building and as some of those books were repeatedly read, their impact is undeniable.

Ex post, would I change my reading selection?  Certainly.  I do not think my choices were particularly apt to build a secure and open minded personality.  And they did go all more or less in the same direction: good will, nice feelings, be supportive, respect the elders, sentimentalism etc.  Not a lot of sense of adventure (or very controlled one) neither real respect for difference.  And a quite classist vision of the world and the life.

I have read different things afterwords, but it was too late ……

PS in fact I had in mind another word starting with O for the same concept, probably coming from Latin, but cannot recall it

The other day I was in Maputo and had to reach swiftly an African Union press conference.
I was looking for a taxi but an Ape-like motobike (sort of southern African tuk tuk with a driver and two possible passengers) stopped by.
I mentioned the conference venue and the driver did not know it but embarked me anyway.
After one minute the fellow traveller was showing to the driver the place on its smartphone by google map.
Africa.

The other day on Belgian TV there was a service on nurses training before going to Africa to attend Ebola victims.  And today in the newspapers there is the info about the Medecins sans Frontiers doctor who went back to New York with Ebola.

That is courage.