Well, this wasn’t the month when things got fixed, or even marginally better. I still have no idea when will I be able to travel home without worries, know that my friends and family are safe, go for a (one, several) careless pint(s) in a pub. On the up side, there’s that ship stuck in the Suez canal, and I finally have an inkling why delivering my Totoro stickers can last several months.

I am also actively dreaming of the day when the whole lockdown drama will be just a distant memory, in precarious equilibrium on the edge of scary and amusing, and I’ll go, well, at least it gave us that Arctic Monkeys-Yazoo mashup by those lovely gents in their living room.

Without any further ado, a sloth playing with water and a face-planting albatross . I know I may have previously claimed to have found several spirit animals, but these two together are just the right combination of inquisitive and clumsy to be perfect in every way.

In a world where any score of anything ever is just a click away (though it’d better not be, when said score is an away loss to Armenia), I felt a pang of nostalgia at being reminded of the teletext. I’d actually watch the teletext of Rai Uno, just that one page with the scores of the round’s games, and intensely will the digits to change in the way I wanted them to. Something they did and, of course, sometimes they didn’t.

Little did I know, back then, that the man who, to my chagrin, so often kept Parma’s digit firmly on zero would later become one of my favourite players. And I mean goalkeepers are rarely anyone’s favourite players, their single mistakes wiping out hours of clean sheets from traumatised memories. But Gigi Buffon never had epic howlers, stayed with Juve throughout their trials and tribulations in the purgatorium of Serie B, and is among the very few players who can provide genuinely interesting reading tips. A legend, if there ever was one.

Speaking of legends: I rarely read Vogue these days, but when I do, it’s because of Frances. In a world of botox, freak make up and designer clothes, there is a woman. I won’t say a hero, ’cause what’s a hero? But sometimes there’s a woman, and she’s the woman for her time and place.

That’s a Big Lebowski reference right there, and here’s another one.

I’ve bored a (frankly freakishly large) number of people with the tale of how I once met a bear cub while hiking on a mountain. They’d often assume a)I made the story up b)I was from Canada. Neither of which is correct. I did meet the baby bear, even if fleetingly, and it happened in the Carpathians. And the Carpathians are absolutely awesome, and I sure as hell miss them while stuck abroad.

Stuck is how I often feel when I stare at the immense piles of unread books randomly insinuating themselves around my flat. And then every now and then I just pick up one of them and dive in. And so I did with Leonard Nimoy’s second autobiography, ‘I am Spock‘, and there is no turning back, I am midway through the first season of Star Trek and am constantly amazed how, in spite of all its limitations in technology and wokeness, it remains relentlessly inquisitive, constantly thought provoking and utterly entertaining.

In a fitting development, this month’s playlist features Leonard Nimoy too.