HRH: pre-teen going on 20 ... or 70

"Eh."

"Bo'."

"Si."

"O!"

"Eh."

"Ciao."

This is the regal telephone diction of HRH. He's rather more eloquent with us, but only sometimes, and only just. I guess it's the age, and the concomitant slide into monosyllabic taciturnity.

This summer, a new habit has evolved - the Urbisaglia get-together. Urbisaglia is the little town just 10 minutes away where HRH goes to school. His mates live there. They go out to the local piazza and campo (field) on a daily basis to play football and "hang out" (one of HRH's more verbose phrases).

We typically drop him off at about 4 or 5pm, and pick him up as close to midnight as we can manage. Italians are night owls, and their children get inducted into their ways when they're still toddlers, so there are often plenty of them still milling about when we pick up HRH. Needless to say, this "early" pick-up is not the most popular of our parental actions.

I must confess that rural Italy is probably one of the few places I'd feel comfortable about doing this. I'm sure he'll want to start moving further afield the older he gets - he's already started talking about getting an Ape when he's 14 (fat chance) - so maybe our concerns will grow accordingly then. Last year it was Colmurano, this year Urbisaglia, next year ....?

But even then it's not a major problem - the local comune puts on buses to the discos on the coast a half-hour away that pick them up at 11pm on a Saturday night and bring them back in the wee hours. Now that's what I call a pro-active attempt at keeping the youth happy and keeping them safe at the same time. But in any event, I'm hoping the fairly frequent presence of girls in the current crowd helps to motivate a more "local" interest.

Last night I went to pick him up just before midnight at one of the local bars. Now this is not the type of bar you'd find in the US or the UK or South Africa, for example. Here they're gathering points for the village, probably the biggest item they sell is coffee, and anyway heavy drinking is not something one finds in rural Italy.

The boys had gone down to watch the Inter Milan - Roma derby on TV. When I arrived, they were playing cards on one of the outside tables. Just across from them on another table, the 60 and 70 year-olds were also playing cards. Both tables were engaged in rapid-fire chattering, loud remonstrating, and hand-led gesticulating as is the Italian wont. I had to do a double-take. For a moment I thought I was looking at a superimposition of future time against the present - which one of the old guys was HRH?