back up blog

This is my new friend, gifted to me by way of a Kinder Surprise by a colleague. We christened him in a non-religious ceremony as Forzuto. I like to keep him with me when I work because the Italian for 'Smurf' is 'Puffo.' My little Puffo.  I feel like that is how I will address my future gay son. Want to say something about this post? Talk to me!  Twitter .  Facebook .   Email .  Instagram .   Bloglovin ' .

Sanremo is known as  la Cittá dei Fiori- The City of Flowers. The company HQ is there, and so nomadic friends who hop from Italian town to Italian town teaching- just like me - inevitably end up drifting through. This means at least once a week I veritably launch myself onto the coastal-routed train to head the hour north so that I can get read to and drink too much spritz . I met said friends for lunch last week, and on my way to the restaurant was struck by the colours in the city. I guess when I was there in June I was so busy trying to adheare to my code of conduct that I forget to notice them. EXCEPT NOT REALLY BECAUSE SANREMO HAS THE BESTEST MEMORIES OF ALL THE MEMORIES EVEN WITHOUT THE PRETTY BLOOMS SO WHATEVER, NATURE/EXPENSIVE GARDENERS. I took some time to photograph what evidently I spent all of last month missing, because I knew when I returned tomorrow I'd only have eyes for one thing. CALUM . With my best friend around, those flowers will pale in comparison....

One of the hardest things for me to do is recognise my own worth. Even in some of the most meaningful and lengthy relationships I have, I find it difficult to say you aren’t treating me how I deserve to be treated. Intrinsically, this is laced with I demand that you give me more than you are. But, in my imagination, saying I SHOULD BE GETTING MORE translates to, you think you’re so. Fucking. Awesome. Don’t you? Who the hell are you, anyway? I don’t want to have a conversation with anybody wherein I risk an accusation of immodesty or inflated ego- maybe because on some unconscious level I am accusing myself of the same goddamn thing. Such is the nature of not always knowing your merit. Or worse, being afraid of just how awesomely high your significance on this here planet earth is. It’s ridiculously easy to become the Baby that gets put in the corner when you volunteer for the position. Generally I avoid any type of confrontation about needing more from anyone or anything, however mi...

The thing about working at a school for Dreamers is that by proxy, you have to deal with your own ideals. It’s really hard not to be reflective and pensive and a little bit self-involved when you spend all day fielding questions about your personal life, and philosophy, and exact working history. This job means that right now I spend a lot of time thinking about what precisely my own ambitions are, because, quite frankly, I have very little choice. Also, have we met? OVER-THINK is my middle name. As my current life plan is ‘Move to London to sell the book I wrote about my vagina’, you can see, I suspect, how an existential crisis might arise about, oh, I don’t know, thirty-three BAGILLION times a day. The students here, the colors, question us about our dreams and our values and our past and our futures so intensely that sometimes it’s as if all the little thought hamsters that reside in my brain are sat having lunch with me. They ask the interesting but also noisily inconvenient que...

I've always enjoyed a student protest or two , but when we were told we'd have to clear our 'protest' topic with The Big Boss before we took to the streets of Loano here at DREAMERSchool, we pretty much knew that anything interesting would get veto-ed. It's not good PR to have a project sponsored by the inventor of Kinder Surprise demonstrate against big businesses at the front door now, is it? (Sidenote: if big business pays for projects like this, though, what's to protest?) BUT. Hold on , I thought. What about love? Nobody would veto love... And so yesterday was Love Day, complete with banners and wigs and love notes for strangers. We pounded the pavements with instruments and smiles, grabbing onto old ladies and babies and cute boys on the way to the beach, and we said, ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE. LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED. We took the Secret Love thing to a whole new level. This time, the louder you shouted it the better. And nobody disagreed with us. To say I felt t...

I'm obsessed with taking photographs of the blackboard menus the trattorias and osteria display on the walls and roads around Loano. It doesn't take Dumbledore to figure out that with six short weeks left on terra Italiana I'm starting to panic about a life without ready access to expert pizza with buffalo mozzarella. Or granita. Or   melanzana parmigiana. Or  gnocchi al gorgonzola. Or, or, or... oh hell. Should I just stay for the food? Don't answer that. Want to say something about this post? Talk to me!  Twitter .  Facebook .   Email .  Instagram .   Bloglovin ' .

So, I got some news. I can’t label it bad news, because even though it went in the AWWWW, FUCK! box when it immediately happened, I’ve since had an existential epiphany. This epiphany is in regards to the nature of my very being, and my purpose on this planet, as well as what colour I’d like my hair to be next and exactly how many sachets of mayonnaise I need to ask for with my pizza. So. You know. It’s kind of okay. I didn’t get something that I really, really wanted. A job. A job a very long way away, that I had not one but three interviews for, and would have solved every financial and travel-related conundrum I not-so-secretly have. This job- this amazing, life-altering, must-have-it-right-now-please-universe job- has been simmering on my Life Plan burner for about six months. In my imagination, I was already living halfway across the oceans, and eating food I couldn’t pronounce, with utensils I couldn’t master and people I didn’t know very well but somehow had the best kind of ad...

At DREAMERSchool last week we introduced a game called Secret Love. Everyone was assigned another person to whom they must deliver love notes, gifts, and appreciative gestures- all in the name of spreading a little kindness. The rules specified that it must remain a secret, and it wasn't for a romantic sort of love- just a way to learn how to make new friends feel good. We did it for the bonding. Internet. IT WAS THE MOST MAGICAL GAME OF MY LIFE. At first our high-schoolers were all, this is lame and no, I'm not playing. But after a few days and a dollop of encouragement, they got involved. I thought it was cute when this note was slipped under my door one night. BUT THEN IT GOT SO MUCH BETTER. Walking from the classroom to lunch, magically somebody had made posters that said, ILARIA, YOU ARE AMAZING! along the light fixtures. At lunch, there was the standard presentation of what the students had made for the website , followed by a montage video of one of the boys, made for hi...

Traditionally, I have really rubbish taste in music. I'm not gonna lie. My idea of good tunes are anything that mention getting more ass than a toilet seat . Or a big tattooed black man demeaning hoes and talking about blows.  Pretty much, if I would rip off your balls and shove 'em in your eye sockets if you said that shit to me in real life , I probably want you to put it in a song so that I can dance to it . Paradox, yes. Reasonable enough when on a night out, or a run up in the hills, or as a pick-me-up on the way to an a.m. cappuccino stop I can shake it like Beyonce, despite the fact I'll be sore in the morning and having Lil Wayne asking me if I'm gonna Suck or Not goes against every liberal feminist sensibility in my Emily Pankhurst being? Sorry I'm not sorry. Bitches need some poppin' beats. That all said. I have a friend with impeccable taste in music. This same friend is also so reticent in revealing absolutely anything below the surface of her (hil...

I sat on the beach and looked around surreptitiously from under my twenty Euro shades. It was truly a phenomenon. Not one person here has my body type, I thought to myself. I squinted, twisting my body to look at the twentysomethings rolling their cigarettes beside me; the mother playing with her toddler down by the waves; the group of students behind me. Every woman’s legs go straight up-and-down, with no bulging at the tops of the thighs, I thought. All of them have necks like swans, and they all accentuate them by wearing their beach hair piled, carelessly but faultlessly, on the tops of their pretty heads, I marvelled. Nobody has belly fat; they all have 2-dimensional tummies that manage to be flat and soft at the exact same time, I gawped, head shaking. Going to the beach in Italy is about as much fun as a frontal-lobotomy performed by Ozzy Osbourne on a good day, and enough to push a girl to three rounds of therapeutic gelato whilst resolving never to eat pasta again on a bad one...