London punishes spontaneity. Most people I know here have always planned their social calendars weeks, sometimes months in advance. I know few people who enjoy this aspect of London life, but we all succumb to it, to some extent. Resistance is futile. The alternative is not a life of all-nighters that appear from nowhere at the very last minute. It just means missing out on the plans your friends have made.
I better understood the impulse to forward-plan when I started my previous job at a law firm. It is here that I really began “measuring out my life with coffee spoons,” constrained to organise and document my work time in six-minute billable increments. A similar mindset seeps into the leisure hours of this city’s over-worked population. Keen to ‘optimise’ their brief time outside the workplace, they squeeze it dry, desperate to ensure not a minute goes to waste. Hence the Calendar Tetris so many of us ended up playing in the years before the Coronavirus lockdown: shuffling and reshuffling pre-arranged blocks of fun.
After a brief hiatus, Calendar Tetris is back. If anything it has been intensified by a culture of advance booking. As James Greig wrote in The Guardian back in April: “Spontaneity is an urban ideal we were already losing; the pandemic is just accelerating it.” Restaurants and club nights, but now even ordinary tables at ordinary pubs, are being snapped up ahead of time, in this escalating arms race of forward-planning.
When I arrived in Palermo in September, I was reminded that it is not a place where social plans are fastidiously made and kept. That is not always ideal for a researcher with a non-refundable return ticket, but socially it feels liberating. While many Londoners had planned the last weekend of September months ago, I was thrilled to receive a text from my friend Davide at the end of my first week in Palermo, asking if I fancied a few days in the countryside. We leave on Saturday morning; bring swimming shorts and some light reading.
This spontaneity set the tone for our weekend at Case Vecchie, in Regaleali. This is better known as the legendary Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, which is run by the founder’s daughter, Fabrizia, who very generously hosted us for the weekend. Fabrizia is famed for her knowledge of Sicilian food and its traditions, which she lives and breathes.
On the Sunday morning of my stay at Case Vecchie, Davide stopped me just as I was heading to the pool, to ask if I wanted to come with him and Fabrizia to visit Arcangelo. As well as working in the gardens on the estate, Arcangelo and his son produce home-made wine from the grapes on his vineyards, and today he is being given a hand by Ana, who also works at Anna Tasca Lanza. We drove off to see this cottage industry in action.
Arcangelo’s wine is produced in the most analogue way imaginable — only the initial crushing and destemming work is helped along by a simple machine. The liquid is then extracted from the crushed fruit using an old wooden basket press. Slowly turning the screw on the top forces heavy slabs of wood down on the grapes. They release their juices, which are poured out of a spout at the bottom. We each take a sip of this divine nectar, which is the perfect post-breakfast drink. Its journey is not over yet, of course — it then needs to start fermenting. When the pressing is done, the basket is opened to reveal the dry husks of crushed grapes, compacted together like a cake. Arcangelo and his son break them down with their hands and into a separate plastic container. A sliver of mid-morning sunlight pierces the darkness of the shed where we are standing, and makes the light green grape skins glisten.
On the drive back, Fabrizia noticed that Arcangelo used a beautiful word that I hadn’t heard before, and that is almost never used in colloquial Italian. He explained that after the juice has finished travelling through the machinery, c’asserena, that is, it ‘makes itself serene.’ Sereno, a common adjective, takes on a new life as a reflexive verb. Fabrizia points out that Dante did the same thing with adjectives all the time, making new verbs up as he went. Asserenarsi or rasserenarsi — to make oneself serene (again) — is not quite a neologism, but it is vanishingly rare. It is a precious verb, which implies that wine, and who knows what else, possesses the capacity to create its own serenity. It’s a verb worth holding on to, especially now that I’m back in London, frantically reshuffling my digital calendar after an early morning coffee.