Happy Lupercalia: was this the boisterous precursor to St. Valentine’s Day?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to sacrifice a goat today nor, fun though it sounds, run semi-naked through the city flaying bystanders with strips from the…
Category Archives: Writing Courses
An unique Taste of Tuscany and intriguing ‘taste’ of AI
[It really is Bill writing this blog!] I never use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in my Watermill blogs, believing that la voce narrante, the narrator’s voice, should be individual and idiosyncratic:…
A ‘Zen’ experience beside a Tuscan river: The Watermill’s bamboo glade
Silently and unseen, the leaves have fallen for more than half a century in our bamboo glade between the millstream and the river, creating a cushioned pathway through the towering…
A bicycle made for two
A tandem bicycle, a friend, and a spark of creativity I don’t know whether you have ever been on a tandem bicycle, but in my experience, you need a good…
Bring your NPP to the Watermill. Latest attraction: bicycling in the hills around us, without the hard work
Do you have an NPP? We are always delighted to welcome them to the Watermill, as well as NKPs, NWPs and NILPs! (For the uninitiated, that’s Non-Painting Partners, Non-Knitting Partners,…
Will more sales come tumbling down for Bill’s book?
Learning to blow one’s own trumpet doesn’t come easy to Englishmen like Bill, who are taught diffidence from the year dot. But when a man you admire gives unstinting…
It’s bad luck to wish Italians good luck. Cry wolf instead
In our part of Italy most people think that wishing somebody ‘good luck’ is bad news, believing that doing so is likely to have precisely the opposite effect. So when it…
Sprezzatura! A cool Italian word that could have been invented for Lois
We don’t have a specific word for it in English, but sprezzatura, first coined by an Italian diplomat in the 16th Century, could have been invented for Lois. It…
Lest we forget: everyday reminders of past terrors on our Florence doorstep
Embedded in the pavement by the front door of houses next to our apartment building in Florence are half a dozen small square brass plaques which force us to remember…
Reverse benchmarking points the way ahead
Benchmark, Carlisle Cathedral by Adrian Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0 . Detail. <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Don’t copy – innovate When I hear the word benchmark, I immediately think…