Coventry...

Spent yesterday evening in a Coventry pub with son Chas and an extraordinarily animated Italian woman, Stefania, who is a reader at Birmingham University. In comparison to her, Chas and I looked so English, so undemonstrative, so immobile. Her face registered two or three different emotions every second, and she backed up her words with sweeping hand movements, which were so descriptive that I could probably have followed her gist even with my fingers in my ears. When she talked about other people, she seamlessly 'became' them. If I ever wanted to illustrate a book on body language, I could just set up my camera on a tripod, ask her about Donald Trump, or Brexit or middle-eastern politics, and keep on taking pix…