All day long, clouds frantically chased themselves over my troubled skull in a simphony disturbingly noisy in its silence.

I was wandering in Central London during this Thursday which begun leaving Mario in our Heathrow hide-out. The reception by Ambassador Patel at the Italian Embassy is in honour of Mario Cappato, the leader of the Radical Party and newly appointed prime minister who has recently replaced the centre-right coalition leader Roberto Capezzone. I’m in friendly terms with both Patel and Cappato, and they are great mates between them too, but this is an official occasion and we have to greet each other in rather formal words:

- Ciao, teste di cazzo, eccomi qua!

- Ohé, faccia di culo, come va?

- Ehilà, pezzo di merda, anche tu qui?

You won’t be surprised that the Vatican Nunzio in London is a Pole, as London is Poland’s third most important city after Chicago and the Vatican itself, but you may well wonder why the Italian ambassador in London is an Indian born in India. It all goes back to the time Italy gave them Sonia Ghandi, and that wonderful but poor, developing country returned the present with what they could afford. John Patel grew up in Bergamo as the adopted child of a wealthy business-minded family and made a fortune by exploiting cheap labour in his native country, manufacturing electrical consumer goods such as battery-powered vibrators in contempt of health and safety regulations. The faulty dildos were frequently going berseck, releasing electric shocks, but most customers were reluctant to complain and certainly too ashamed to sue. Some of them were actually enjoying the fault and one of them so much that she became the dildo factory’s chief tester and later Patel’s wife.

There she was, Raffaella Patel, in all her stunning beauty entertaining the diplomatic high society prostrated at her high heels...