End of term

Yesterday we finished the first term of the Italian cultural and intermediate language course I have been attending.

I have enjoyed it as an intellectual distraction and for maintaining my level of Italian. There was festive mood in the class with everyone contributing cakes and biscuits mainly of an Italian nature like panettone, amaretti biscotti and some home baked efforts.

The teacher flourished a bottle of prosecco and our most loquacious member of class asked for  “une grande bicciera” (large glass). We watched the end of Bicycle Thieves, a sad film about the poverty of Rome after World War 2.

A common theme of the Rust is the difficulty we oldies experience in the digital age. In the morning I had earmarked 30 minutes to complete my Xmas cards and important emails. I received an email from Apple, or I thought and hoped it was, over a renewal of a subscription for $350 for some personal training.

The email had a click referral if you did not authorise it. I thought this procedure would be brief but, 20 minutes later, after being asked to change my password and seeing no sign of the sub in my list, I gave up and asked my bank to deal with it.

The problem is that there is rarely a phone number and when later I had to leave delivery instructions for an item with DPD carriers, I did make a call and spent 10 minutes hanging on during which time I was repeatedly told I should use the app – which I attempted to do – only to be informed there was a status error.

This is the second problem: the language is so unclear, in fact I needed to complete a field for the right day. I can picture our younger readers laughing at my incompetence but they should remember our generation had to go from nowhere to Word for Windows overnight.